Reversible Data Hiding for AMBTC Compressed Images Based on Matrix and Hamming Coding

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a two-layer data hiding method by using the Hamming code to enhance the hiding capacity without causing significantly increasing computation complexity for AMBTC-compressed images. To achieve our objective, for the first layer, four disjoint sets using different combinations of the mean value (AVG) and the standard deviation (VAR) are derived according to the combination of secret bits and the corresponding bitmap, following Lin et al.’s method. For the second layer, these four disjoint sets are extended to eight by adding or subtracting 1, according to a matrix embedding with (7, 4) Hamming code. To maintain reversibility, we must return the irreversible block to its previous state, which is the state after the first layer of data is embedded. Then, to losslessly recover the AMBTC-compressed images after extracting the secret bits, we use continuity feature, the parity of pixels value, and the unique number of changed pixels in the same row to restore AVG and VAR. Finally, in comparison with state-of-the-art AMBTC-based schemes, it is confirmed that our proposed method provided two times the hiding capacity comparing with other six representative AMBTC-based schemes while maintaining acceptable file size of steog-images.