Data hiding method based on reference matrix

A data hiding method based on a reference matrix generated base-5 numeral system was presented in this article. The method fully exploits the embedding space in reference matrix to achieve high embedding capability and acceptable embedding quality. The results of experiment indicate that the average value of PSNR (Peak Signal Noise Ratio) of stego images with full payload generated by this method is about 43.7dB, which demonstrates good visual quality. Furthermore, an embedding capacity of 2.3219 bpp (bit per pixel) was achieved in the proposed method, which means that for an image sized by 512×512, 608679 bits can be carried. This is much greater than that of the method of Chang et al.