A new data hiding strategy with restricted region protection

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel data hiding scheme that aims to prevent certain regions from modifying. These regions are specified by users, and a location map is generated to indicate where the changeable pixels are located. To reduce the size of this extra information, the location map is compressed using modified Huffman coding, and the compressed code is embedded into cover images. The Huffman code and the secret information can be separated automatically during the extracting procedure, without knowing the size of the compressed code in advance. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme has flexibility in data hiding capacity and stego image quality control, and the regions can be preserved well. Thus, the proposed scheme can be applied to a wide variety of applications.

Keywords:

• DATA HIDING
• HUFFMAN CODING
• WET PAPER
• LOCATION MAP