A steganography strategy based on equivalence partitions of hiding units

This paper designs a novel hiding strategy based on an equivalence relation, which can remarkably enhance the quality of stego image without sacrificing the security and capacity of original steganography schemes. According to a constructed equivalence relation based on the capacity of hiding units, all hiding units can be partitioned into equivalence classes. Following that, the hiding procedure is performed in predefined order in equivalence classes as the traditional steganography scheme. Because of considering the relation between the length of message and capacity, the performance of the hiding method using proposed hiding strategy outperforms the original approaches when embedding the same length message. Experimental results indicate that the gain from the proposed strategy over existing hiding schemes can reach up to 4.0 dB.