ABSTRACT Image steganography aims to conceal confidential information within digital images in an undetectable manner. However, many existing techniques face a trade‐off between embedding capacity, imperceptibility, and computational efficiency, especially transform‐domain approaches based on floating‐point operations. This paper proposes a novel image steganographic method based on an enhanced Pyramid Integer Wavelet Transform (PIWT) combined with a Modified Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process (MOPAP). The PIWT enables integer‐to‐integer transformation, avoiding floating‐point computations and improving its suitability for efficient implementation. Secret data are embedded into transform coefficients using a linear feedback shift register (LFSR) to introduce randomness in the embedding locations, while the proposed MOPAP is employed to reduce embedding distortion and enhance imperceptibility. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 50.1 dB at an embedding capacity of 1 bpp, outperforming conventional Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Lifting Wavelet Transform (LWT) steganographic methods in terms of imperceptibility and embedding capacity. In addition, statistical evaluation indicates improved resistance against classical steganalysis compared to baseline approaches. These results confirm that the proposed method provides an effective balance between embedding capacity, imperceptibility, and computational efficiency, making it a promising solution for secure image‐based data hiding applications.
Al‐Ashwal et al. (Thu,) studied this question.