MPSteg-color: data hiding through redundant basis decomposition

The possibility of using redundant basis expansion to securely hide a message within a cover color image is explored by improving previous attempts in this sense in terms of security and payload. The stability and computational complexity problems of previous works are solved by introducing new selection and update rules working entirely in the integer domain, and by fully exploiting the availability of three color bands in such a way that all the available atoms in the three color bands are used to convey the stego-message. Image decomposition is randomized in several ways thus improving the stego-message undetectability, and making the hidden message undetectable by targeted steganalyzers explicitly developed to exploit the weaknesses of the MPSteg algorithm. The security of the new scheme is also evaluated by testing it against blind steganalyzers and compared to that of plusmn1 embedding algorithm applied in the pixel domain.