Adaptive PVD and LSB based high capacity data hiding scheme

Abstract

In this paper, a new data hiding scheme using a mixture of adaptive pixel value differencing (PVD) and least significant bit substitution (LSB) is proposed for increasing the data hiding capacity. The scheme is a generalization of Jung (J Real-Time Image Proc. 14:127–36, 2018) which is the first work to use PVD and LSB methods simultaneously on a single image. However, the PVD used by Jung (J Real-Time Image Proc. 14:127–36, 2018) is not an adaptive method means it does not consider the vertical and diagonal edges of the image for hiding the secret data. In the proposed scheme, the vertical and diagonal edges in addition to horizontal edges are used for hiding the secret data so that a large amount of secret data is hidden without any perceived change. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is superior to the existing schemes in terms of both data hiding capacity and image quality. Moreover, it is very simple as it does not require much computation for embedding the secret data.