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High performance reversible data hiding for block truncation coding compressed images

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Abstract

Reversible data hiding has been a hot research topic because it can recover both the host media and hidden data without distortion. Because most digital images are stored and transmitted in compressed forms, such as JPEG, vector quantization, and block truncation coding (BTC), the reversible data hiding schemes in compressed domains have been paid more and more attention. Compared with transform coding, BTC has a significantly low complexity and less memory requirement, it therefore becomes an ideal data hiding domain. Traditional data hiding schemes in the BTC domain modify the BTC encoding stage or BTC-compressed data according to the secret bits, and they have a relatively low efficiency and meanwhile may reduce the image quality. This paper presents a novel reversible data hiding scheme based on the joint neighbor coding technique for BTC-compressed images by further losslessly encoding the BTC-compressed data according to the secret bits. First, BTC is performed on the original image to obtain the BTC-compressed data that can be represented by a high mean table, a low mean table, and a bitplane sequence. Then, the secret data are losslessly embedded in both the high mean and low mean tables. Our hiding scheme is a lossless method based on the relation among the current value and the neighboring ones in mean tables. In addition, it can averagely embed 2 bits in each mean value, which increases the capacity and efficiency. Experimental results show that our scheme outperforms three existing BTC-based data hiding works, in terms of the bit rate, capacity, and efficiency.

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Abbreviations

A :

The image width

a :

The block width

B :

The image height

b :

The block height

b i :

The initial reference location for encoding I cur, h cur and l cur

b o :

The offset of the reference index used to encode I cur

\({b_{o}^{(H)}}\) :

The offset of the reference high mean for encoding h cur

\({b_{o}^{(L) }}\) :

The offset of the reference low mean for encoding l cur

BP:

The codestream of bitplane

b r :

The final location of the reference index to encode I cur

\({b_{r}^{(H)}}\) :

The final location of the reference high mean for encoding h cur

\({b_{r}^{(L)}}\) :

The final location of the reference low mean for encoding l cur

CS H :

The codestream of the embedded high mean table

CS L :

The codestream of the embedded low mean table

D :

The difference between I cur and I ref

D H :

The difference between h cur and h ref

D L :

The difference between l cur and l ref

\({(D^{(m)})_{2}}\) :

The m bits binary code of D

H :

The high mean table

h ij , 1 ≤ i ≤ A/a, 1 ≤ j ≤ B/b :

The high mean of block x (ij)

h cur :

The current high mean to be encoded

h ref :

The reference high mean used to encode h cur

I cur :

The current index to be encoded

I ref :

The reference index used to encode I cur

l ij , 1 ≤ i ≤ A/a, 1 ≤ j ≤ B/b :

The low mean of block x (ij)

L :

The low mean table

L :

The codestream length

l cur :

The current low mean to be encoded

l ref :

The reference low mean used to encode l cur

m :

The truncation integer used to distinguish the range of D, D H , and D L

N :

The VQ codebook size

n :

The number of neighboring indices considered

P :

The bitplane sequence

p ij , 1 ≤ i ≤ A/a, 1 ≤ j ≤ B/b :

The bitplane of block x (ij)

t ij , 1 ≤ i ≤ A/a, 1 ≤ j ≤ B/b :

The mean value of block x (ij)

X :

The original image

\({\left\lceil x \right\rceil}\) :

The least integer not less than x

x (ij), 1 ≤ i ≤ A/a, 1 ≤ j ≤ B/b :

The image block in the i-th row and j-th column

\({x_{uv}^{(ij)},\; 1\leq u \leq a, 1 \leq v \leq b}\) :

The pixel at the location (u, v) of block x (ij)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Zhejiang University, Room 501, Teaching Building 5, Yuquan Campus, Hangzhou, 310027, People’s Republic of China

    Wei Sun, Zhe-Ming Lu, Yu-Chun Wen, Fa-Xin Yu & Rong-Jun Shen

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  1. Wei Sun
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  2. Zhe-Ming Lu
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  3. Yu-Chun Wen
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  4. Fa-Xin Yu
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  5. Rong-Jun Shen
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Correspondence to Zhe-Ming Lu.

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Sun, W., Lu, ZM., Wen, YC. et al. High performance reversible data hiding for block truncation coding compressed images. SIViP 7, 297–306 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-011-0238-4

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