Abstract: In order to  improve the security and  capacity of quantum steganography, we  designed a steganography scheme based on Gray code rules. The scheme took the  color images as carrier,  firstly,  the secret information was divided into 3 bit segments, and then each  segment of secret information was embedded into the least significant bit (LSB) of the RGB channel of carrier pixel based on Gray code rule to complete the information embedding process. Extracting is the inverse process of embedding, firstly,  3 bit secret information segments were extracted from the RGB channel of the carrier pixel, and then they were spliced and restored  to the original secret information. Each carrier  pixel of the scheme could  contain 3 bits of secret information, which had a high embedding capacity. The embedding rules based on Gray code effectively improved the security of the embedding scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is superior to  other similar  schemes in terms of embedding capacity and security.

Key words: quantum image processing, quantum image steganography, Gray code, least significant bit, embedding capacity