Reversible Data Hiding using Histogram Shifting

Abstract

With the current state-of-the-art technology, intruders can easily gain access to sensitive information. To avoid this, different methods with improved security to hide information have been developed like, covert channels, hiding data in images, null ciphers, etc. The focus of this work is to enhance the security and data hiding capacity of the current state-of-the-art reversible data hiding algorithms.

The proposed data hiding method is designed such that the original image is losslessly restored after extraction of a payload. The proposed framework allows embedding of a binary bit stream into the host or cover image while retaining the quality of the image. The payload can be extracted at the receiver without any additional information (peak and zero values) about the stego image in which data is hidden. Experimental results indicate that the reversible data hiding scheme outperforms other approaches in the literature in terms of security and marked image quality.