High-Performance Reversible Data Hiding

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Lin, Ching-Chiuan | Hsueh, Nien-Lin | Shen, Wen-Hsiang

Affiliations: Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan. E-mail: cclin@ocit.edu.tw; nlhsueh@fcu.edu.tw; shen@ocit.edu.tw

Abstract: This paper proposes a high-performance reversible data hiding algorithm based on the block difference histogram of a cover image. If a message is to be embedded into an image, the difference of the block at the maximum point is increased by 1 or left unchanged if the message bit is "1" or "0", respectively. Experimental results show that the average payload capacity of the test images can be up to 1.52 bits per pixel (bpp). Average payload and pure payload capacities for PSNR⩾30 dB can be up to 1.13 bpp and 1.06 bpp, respectively. Moreover, the original cover image can be recovered without any distortion and the implementation of the proposed algorithm is very easy.

Keywords: Reversible data hiding, lossless watermark, steganography

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 82, no. 1-2, pp. 155-169, 2008