Efficient reversible data hiding multimedia technique based on smart image interpolation

Abstract

Reversible data hiding (RDH) within images is the process of securing data into cover images without degradation. Its challenge is to hide a large payload while taking into account the human visual system so that the distortion of the stego-image is negligible. It is highly desired for the images that have special requirements like the ones in the medical and military fields where the original images are required to be regenerated with no loss after extracting the data. In this paper, we propose an interpolation-based RDH (IRDH) scheme that improves Lee and Huang’s scheme and Malik et al.’s scheme by combining their embedding techniques along with the optimal pixel adjustment process (OPAP) in a way that increases the embedding capacity and the visual quality of both the schemes. In this presented scheme, we start by stretching the size of the original image using the existing enhanced neighbor mean interpolation (ENMI) interpolation technique then the data is embedded into the interpolated pixels using our novel embedding method that depends on the intensity of the pixels and the maximized difference values. This innovative scheme presented all steps covering generation of the interpolated image, data embedding, data extraction and image recovery, making it in testing situation to be compared fairly with others. The experimental results demonstrate that the achieved embedding capacity by our hiding technique is more than 537 Kb for all the test images. Also, the experiments show that our proposed scheme has the highest embedding capacity among five current schemes which are Jung and Yoo’s scheme, Lee and Huang’s scheme, Chang et al.’s scheme, Zhang et al.’s scheme and Malik et al.’s scheme with attractive image security quality.