Novel embedding secrecy within images utilizing an improved interpolation-based reversible data hiding scheme

Abstract

This paper proposed an innovative approach for reversible data hiding (RDH) within images in such a way that the image can be accurately recovered after extracting the data. The work presented a challenging task due to the need to compromise between the quality of the stego-image and the capacity of the hidden data. It is used in applications that need to reconstruct the original images without any distortion, such as medical diagnosis, remote sensing images and military maps. The aim of this paper is to study improving RDH methods using interpolation-based scheme. The proposed interpolation-based RDH (IRDH) scheme improves the embedding capacity and security over state-of-the-art schemes. We investigated the interpolation techniques improving the parabolic interpolation (PI) method to scale-up the original image, then embedding within it the secret data using newly proposed embedding technique. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed quadratic Bezier interpolation (QBI) technique reduced the computational complexity of PI with same quality of the produced image. Additionally, the proposed cubic interpolation techniques improved the image quality of PI but with more computational complexity. On the other hand, the proposed circle interpolation (CIRI) achieved less PSNR value than PI showing interesting remarks. The general steps of this scheme are generation of the interpolated image, data embedding, data extraction and image recovery showing attractive promising research contribution.

Keywords

• Lossless data hiding
• Image Steganography
• Image interpolation
• Data embedding