A new steganographic method for RGB color images using estimation of variance field in the wavelet domain

In this paper we present a steganographic method for RGB color images based on estimation of the variance field using the wavelet atomic function fup₂ for adaptive steganographic applications. We introduce a preprocessing stage to allow that the resulted stego-images are less detectable by the steganalyzers increasing the embedding capacity. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other methods proposed in the literature in terms of hiding capacity and image quality.