A Novel Method for High Capacity Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Using Difference Expansion

Data hiding techniques are very significant in the research area of information security. In this article, the authors propose a new reversible data hiding (RDH) scheme using difference expansion. At first, the original image is partitioned into 3 × 3 pixel blocks, then marked Type-one and Type-two pixels based on their coordinate values. After that, the authors find correlated pixels by computing correlation coefficients and the median of Type-one pixels. Next, secret data bits are embedded within Type-two pixels based on correlated pixels and Type-one pixels based on the stego Type-two pixels. The data extraction process successfully extracts secret data as well as recovers the cover image. The authors observed the effects of the proposed method by performing experiments on some standard cover images and found significantly better result in terms of data hiding capacity compared with existing data hiding schemes.