Hiding Data Reversibly in an Image via Increasing Differences between Two Neighboring Pixels

Ching-Chiuan LIN  Nien-Lin HSUEH 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E90-D  No.12  pp.2053-2059
Publication Date: 2007/12/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Image Processing and Video Processing
Keyword: 
information hiding,  steganography,  reversible data hiding, 

Full Text: PDF(780.4KB)

Summary: 
This paper proposes a simple, efficient method that, based on increasing the differences between two neighboring pixels, losslessly embeds a message into a host image. The point at which the number of pixel differences in the image is at a maximum is selected to embed the message. The selected difference is increased by 1 or left unchanged if the embedded bit is "1" or "0", respectively. On the other hand, differences larger than the selected difference are increased by 1. Increasing a difference is done by adding 1 to or subtracting 1 from the pixel if its value is larger or smaller than its preceding pixel, respectively. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve a high payload capacity while the image distortion of the stego-image remains minimal.