A new difference expansion transform in triplets for reversible data hiding

Abstract

Difference expansion (DE) has been widely used for reversible data hiding. In this paper, a novel transform which embeds two bits of information in a triplet of coefficients is presented. This transform can be applied in spatial or frequency domains and induces minimum distortion to the initial data or coefficients. The proposed method outperforms all similar DE methods using triplets in terms of computational cost, visual quality and bitrate.

Keywords:

• 3C2B
• difference expansion
• lossless data hiding
• triplets
• DCT

2010 AMS Subject Classifications :

• 94A62
• 94A08
• 68P30

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the European Union – European Social Fund (75%), the Greek Government – Ministry of Development – General Secretariat of Research and Technology (25%) and the Private Sector in the frames of the European Competitiveness Programme (Third Community Support Framework – Measure 8.3 – programme – contract no.03EΔ832).