Steganography with high payload is the needs of the real application in the context of large data.Nowadays,the published steganography have the significant achievements on the embedding quality,but the embedding capacity usually is not enough.In this paper,a new image data embedding with large payload based on reference matrix method is proposed.The reference matrix is generated by a base-9 numeral system,which guides cover pixel pairs modifications.Compared to the recent methods,the experimental results show the proposed method not only ensures the accepted image quality,but has the larger embedding capacity which is up to 3.169 bpp.