A difference expansion based reversible information hiding scheme with high stego image visual quality

Abstract

Reversible data hiding can embed secret data into the cover image to cheat hackers, thereby avoiding the interception attack. The previous methods modify non-embeddable pixels to create hiding spaces, which decreases the quality of the stego image. In order to improve the image quality, we keep the non-embeddable pixels and use a few flag bits to discriminate between the embedded pixels and the non-embeddable pixels. Experimental results showed that the proposed method can achieve better image quality than the reversible steganographic methods that proposed recently.