A High Capacity Data Hiding Scheme Using Modified AMBTC Compression Technique

In this paper, a data hiding scheme is proposed which modifies the Absolute Moment Block Truncation Coding (AMBTC) technique to embed a large amount of secret data. This scheme employs a user-defined threshold value to classify the AMBTC compressed blocks as complex block and smooth block. In the case of smooth blocks, the bit plane is replaced with the secret data bits. Later, the quantization levels are re-calculated so that distortion is minimized. While for complex blocks, the bit plane is reconstructed in which every pixel is represented by two bits instead of just one bit. Now, the secret data is embedded into the first LSB of the bit plane. Finally, four new quantization levels are calculated for preserving the closeness of the resultant block to the original block. Thus, the proposed scheme is able to utilize each and every pixel of the cover image to hide the secret data while maintaining the image quality. This scheme achieves 1 bit per pixel data hiding capacity for every image. Experimental results show that our scheme is superior to the other existing schemes in terms of both hiding capacity and image quality