RS and Chi-square analyses are powerful steganalytic techniques for detecting the presence of secret information embedded in the least-significant-bit(LSB) plane of digital images. This paper describes an improved LSB steganographic scheme that can effectively resist both RS and Chi-square analyses without sacrificing perceptual quality of the cover image. In the described steganographic technique

a pair of mutually complementary mappings

F1 and F-1

is used

leading to a balanced behavior of several statistical parameters explored by the two steganalytic approaches

therefore improved security. In other words

not only can the flipping between 2i and 2i + 1 be used

but also changes from 2i to 2i-1 or from 2i-1 to 2i are allowable. Although modification to the host pixels may affect the higher bit planes

the induced distortion to the host image is not increased compared to the simple LSB replacement technique. Extraction of the embedded information can still be accomplished by extracting the LSB plane as in the straight LSB method. The proposed method has low computation complexity and is easy to implement. Analysis of the effectiveness and experimental results are presented.