An Effective Lossless Hiding Technique Based on Reversible Contrast Mapping and Histogram Embedding Methods

Abstract

Lossless data hiding is a technique that used to embed secret message into media for generating the stego image. The receiver who obtains the stego image can extract the secret message from it and restore the original media via the extraction and recovery image algorithms. Coltuc and Chassery combined look-up table and reversible contrast mapping technique to generate a very fast watermarking embedding scheme in 2007. Their scheme is simple and the hiding capacity is high. In addition, the image quality of the stego image generated by their scheme is fine. However, in their method, absolute difference is used to control image distortion. If the value of the absolute difference is low, then the hiding capacity will be limited and decreased. Therefore, we apply the histogram technique to improve Coltuc and Chassery’s scheme. The experimental results show that the image quality of the proposed scheme is better than that of Coltuc and Chassery’s scheme.