Abstract
Reversible data hiding (RDH) is an active research area in the field of information security. The RDH scheme allows the transmission of a secret message by embedding it into a cover image, and the receiver can recover the original cover image along with the extraction of the secret message. In this paper, we propose a bit plane compression based RDH scheme to hide a sequence of secret message bits into a grayscale image. In the proposed method, a selected bit plane of the cover image will be compressed using run-length encoding (RLE) scheme. Further, the RLE sequence has been efficiently encoded as a binary sequence using Elias gamma encoding method. The Elias gamma encoded bit sequence concatenated with the secret message bits are used to replace the selected bit plane after performing a sequence of Arnold transform. The Arnold transform helps to find a new scrambled version of the bit plane which is very close to the original bit plane to ensure the visual quality of the stego image. The RLE is a lossless compression technique, therefore recovery of the original image is possible by the receiver. The experimental study of the proposed scheme on the images from standard image dataset (USC-SIPI image dataset) shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing scheme in terms of the visual quality of the stego image without compromising the data embedding rate.
Highlights
The image data hiding techniques provide a way to embed secret data into a cover image for purposes such as data authentication, copyright protection, user identification, secret communication, etc. [1, 2]
The experimental study of the proposed scheme has been carried out on the standard images downloaded from USC-SIPI image dataset [26]
All the images are converted into 8-bit grayscale images of size 256×256 pixels, and a pseudo-random bit sequence has been used as the secret message
Summary
The image data hiding techniques provide a way to embed secret data into a cover image for purposes such as data authentication, copyright protection, user identification, secret communication, etc. [1, 2]. The difference expansion based RDH scheme selects a pair of pixels from the original image to embed a secret message bit. The conventional difference expansion and histogram shifting based RDH schemes require to make large modifications on the pixel values of the cover image, and it may lead to low-quality stego images. Apart from these schemes, a few other schemes such as guided filtering based RDH [22] and RDH scheme with contrast enhancement have been reported in the literature [23] In this manuscript, we propose a novel bit-plane compression based RDH scheme which provides better embedding rate without compromising the visual quality of the stego image. To achieve better visual quality for the stego image, the compressed data along with the secret message bits have been scrambled using Arnold transform, and an Arnold transform version which provides minimum mean square error has been selected to replace the selected bit plane. The novelty of the proposed scheme is that to obtain good quality stego image even after data hiding process, a combination of run-length encoding, Elias gamma encoding, and Arnold transform are used for the first time in literature
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