Increasing Payload in Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for Image Steganography

Abstract

Reversible data hiding is the technique that allows embedding (hiding) data in an image and later the hidden data as well as the exact copy of the image can be recovered at the receiver’s end. Two important aspects of reversible data hiding are high quality and good capacity. The distortions to the original signal should be such that artifacts are not visible since these distortions may create problems in some fields such as medical, astronomical, and military images due to legal reasons. To efficiently solve the abovementioned observations, we propose yet another reversible algorithm that embeds the secret upon the histogram of grayscales of image pixels, where the secret is embedded using the related information near to peak area in histogram. The proposed algorithm removes some extra data which were previously needed as in Ni et al.’s algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm has noticeable capacity improvement when compared to Ni et al.’s algorithm although it has some quality degradation. The stego image quality from proposed method is still quite good and far better than the established standards.