An image hiding method by linking multiple pixels with XOR operator

In 2006, Mielikaine's method partitioned pixels into pixel pairs. Two secret bits are embedded to a pixel pair through modifying only one pixel. After that, Chan's method linked bits of two continuous pixels by using XOR operator to further reduce the pixel modifications. To generalize Chan's method, in this paper, the concept of linking multiple pixels by using XOR operator is introduced. This way, Chan's method becomes a special case of the proposed method. Moreover, through the proposed concept, modifying one pixel can further affect more results of XOR operator. That means the proposed method can embed more than two secret bits through modifying one pixel by adding/subtracting its pixel value to/from one. The procedures of secret embedding and extracting by linking three pixels are also represented in this paper. According to the experimental results, the pixel modifications in the proposed method are fewer than those in Mielikaine's method and Chan's method in most cases.