Abstract Visual attention is an important characteristic in the human perception system. However,most visual perception based steganography algorithms consider low-level factors only,such as brightness,contrast and masking effect. A gray image steganography algorithm is proposed based on visual attention and local complexity. The local complexity of the image is analyzed by standard deviation algorithm. Then,the Itti visual attention model is introduced into more complex areas,and the attention characteristics are quantitatively identified by visual entropy. Finally,the steganography is implemented by LSB method on different image blocks segmented through the hierarchies of visual attention and local complexity. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm maintains good imperceptibility after embedding large-capacity information and resists the histogram contrast steganalysis.
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2013, Vol. 26 
