Enhancing Information Security for Text-Based Data Hiding Using Midpoint Folding Approach: A Comparative Analysis

The activity of concealing information or data within a carrier entity in a way that is difficult for unauthorized users to notice is known as information hiding, sometimes known as data hiding. Different types of digital material, such as pictures, audio files, movies, text documents, and network protocols, can use information-concealing strategies. This paper proposes a text-based data-hiding approach using Huffman and the midpoint folding technique, which increases the payload capacity and reduces the embedding distortion. Results show that the average PSNR obtained is 57.23, which depicts the good quality of stego images, making them indistinguishable from the human visual system (HVS). Also, on concealing 2 KB of data in four considered dataset images, an average of PSNR = 57.23195, WPSNR = 55.31998, SSIM = 0.993238, and MSE = 0.125765, which proves the credibility of the proposed method.