An Adaptive Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Using AMBTC and Quantization Level Difference

Yan-Hong Chen,Zhi-Ming Wang,Chin-Chen Chang,Chia-Chen Lin

doi:10.3390/app11020635

Abstract

Hiding a message in compression codes can reduce transmission costs and simultaneously make the transmission more secure. This paper presents an adaptive reversible data hiding scheme that is able to provide large embedding capacity while improving the quantity of modified images. The proposed scheme employs the quantization level difference (QLD) and interpolation technique to adaptively embed the secret information into pixels of each absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC)-compressed block, except for the positions of two replaced quantization levels. The values of QLD tend to be much larger in complex areas than in smooth areas. In other words, our proposed method can obtain good performance for embedding capacity and still meets the requirement for better modified image quality when the image is complex. The performance of the proposed approach was compared to previous image hiding methods. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms referenced approaches.

Highlights

With the rapid development of internet communication and computer technology, a large number of information is transmitted over the internet
When digital data are transmitted through the internet, some sensitive data may become vulnerable to the malicious users
A data hiding scheme can be divided into three categories, i.e., spatial domain, frequency domain, and compressed domain

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid development of internet communication and computer technology, a large number of information is transmitted over the internet. Wu and Sun [16] presented a data hiding method in which each secret bit is embedded into the bitmap of the BTC compression codes. In 2011, Li et al [22] introduced a reversible image hiding based on the BTC-compressed approach In this scheme, the histogram shifting and bitmap flipping technique were used to hide secret bits. We propose an adaptive reversible data hiding scheme that is based on an AMBTC compression domain and quantization level difference. In this scheme, the cover image is compressed into corresponding quantizers and a bitmap image by absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC).

Embedding Phase

Extraction and Recovery Phase

The Proposed Scheme