Affiliations: School of Optical-Electrical and Comp. Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, China | Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan, qin@usst.edu.cn | School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024, Liaoning, China, wangzhihui1017@gmail.com | Department of Information Engineering and Comp. Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan | Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Asia University, Taichung 41354, Taiwan, alan3c@gmail.com | Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi 62102, Taiwan, kuonan.chen@gmail.com
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, 100 Wenhwa Road, Taichung 40724, Taiwan
Abstract: Reversible/lossless image data hiding schemes provide the capability to embed secret information into a cover image where the original carrier can be totally restored after extracting the secret information. This work presents a high performance reversible image data hiding scheme especially in stego image quality control using image inpainting, an efficient image processing skill. Embeddable pixels chosen from a cover image are initialized to a fixed value as preprocessing for inpainting. Subsequently, these initialized pixels are repaired using inpainting technique based on partial differential equations (PDE). These inpainted pixels can be used to carry secret bits and generate a stego image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme produces low distortion stego images and it also provides satisfactory hiding capacity.
Keywords: reversible data hiding, lossless data hiding, hiding capacity, image inpainting, image quality
