A High-Payload Data Hiding Scheme Based on Absolute Moment Block Truncation Coding for Minimizing Hiding Impact

Abstract

Data hiding encompasses a wide range of applications related to hiding messages in digital images. The visual redundancy of images makes it possible to embed data in the images without attracting attention. Increasing the hiding capacity and decreasing the hiding distortion are prime objectives that data hiding intends to achieve. In this paper, we propose a high-payload data hiding scheme based on absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) to minimize the impact of hiding. A two-level minimum mean square error (MMSE) quantizer generated by AMBTC is used to decrease the distortion associated with hiding. Also, we present a lookup table based on the symmetric property for adaptively hiding secrets in pixels to achieve high hiding capacity. We can embed almost 1.9 bits per pixel (bpp) with a high image quality of an average of 31 dB. Only 5.3% of pixels are changed during the data-hiding process. Compared with other schemes, we can use 1 bpp more relative payload for embedding with the same stego image quality. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has better hiding performance because it allows a huge amount of secret data to be hidden while maintaining the high visual quality of the stego image.