High capacity multi-bit data hiding based on modified histogram shifting technique

Abstract

A novel data hiding technique based on modified histogram shifting that incorporates multi‐bit secret data hiding is proposed. The proposed technique divides the image pixel values into embeddable and nonembeddable pixel values. Embeddable pixel values are those that are within a specified limit interval surrounding the peak value of an image. The limit interval is calculated from the number of secret bits to be embedded into each embeddable pixel value. The embedded secret bits can be perfectly extracted from the stego image at the receiver side without any overhead bits. From the simulation, it is found that the proposed technique produces a better quality stego image compared to other data hiding techniques, for the same embedding rate. Since the proposed technique only embeds the secret bits in a limited number of pixel values, the change in the visual quality of the stego image is negligible when compared to other data hiding techniques.

An Advanced Reversible Data Hiding Algorithm Using Local Similarity, Curved Surface Characteristics, and Edge Characteristics in Images

“…Data hiding techniques using an additional reference matrix are proposed to increase embedding efficiency [16][17][18][19], and those using pixel value ordering (PVO) are also used [20][21][22][23]. Various reversible data hiding techniques have been recently proposed to hide confidential data by shifting the histogram of an image [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]. In particular, among these techniques, the techniques of [35][36][37][38] are reversible data hiding techniques using a prediction image.…”