Affiliations: Department of Information Management, The Overseas
Chinese Institute of Technology, Taichung 40721, Taiwan. cclin@ocit.edu.tw;
ysp@ocit.edu.tw | Department of Information Engineering and Computer
Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan. nlhsueh@fcu.edu.tw
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Department of Information
Management, 100 Chiao-Kwang Road, Taichung 40721, Taiwan
Abstract: This paper proposes a reversible data hiding scheme based on
three-circular-pixel (TCP) difference expansion. To embed a message in an
image, the image is divided into three-pixel blocks, each of which is, then,
transformed into a TCP block with two differences. When the pixel value of the
largest pixel in the TCP block is increased, two differences are increased
– one is between the largest and the smallest, and the other is between
the largest and the middle. Expanding the two differences in the block by
increasing the largest pixel value may make the image less modified. In
addition, the number of pixel pairs is increased to two thirds of the number of
pixels in the image. Compared to Tian's study, both the visual quality and the
embedding capacity of the image are significantly improved.
Keywords: Difference expansion , information hiding, reversible data hiding, steganography
