Asymmetric Data Hiding for Compressed Images with High Payload and Reversibility

Abstract

Hiding secret data in digital images is an attractive topic in the information security research area. Because the data-embedded stego image looks exactly the same as a regular image, transmitting secret data with stego images does not draw the attention of eavesdroppers, thus fulfilling the goal of information security. Many reversible data hiding (RDH) methods for absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) compressed images have been proposed. These methods hide secret data in an AMBTC-compressed image to produce a stego image and transmit it to the recipient. Upon receiving the stego image, the recipient can extract the secret data and recover the AMBTC-compressed image. In this paper, we propose an RDH scheme for AMBTC-compressed images with an asymmetric embedding rule. Using the AMBTC-compressed version as the basis, the proposed embedding scheme always modifies a pixel value toward its original value with a step size (bitrate) proportional to the gap width. Therefore, the visual quality of the stego image is better than the referred AMBTC version. Additionally, as a result of the adaptive bitrate strategy, the data embedding capacity of the proposed scheme outperforms that of state-of-the-art methods. The security of the resulting stego images was also tested by RS-steganalysis. Experimental results show that the overall performance of the proposed scheme is satisfactory. We revised it, please confirm.