Two-layer reversible data hiding based on AMBTC Image with (7, 4) hamming code

Abstract

In Malik et al.'s method, each pixel can be embedded with log23 bits by being modified at most 1. Thus, their method achieves significant hiding capacity while maintaining good visual quality. However, in their method, the first lower and the first upper quantization levels must be excluded from data embedding in order to ensure reversibility. To this end, we propose a two-layer reversible data hiding (RDH) scheme in combination with (7,4) Hamming code. In the 1st-layer embedding, each block can be embedded with 16 bits. In the 2nd-layer embedding, each already-modified block can carry 6 bits or 12 bits by taking advantage of (7,4) Hamming code that hides three bits by modifying only one bit. At most 2-bit additional information is needed to help decoders to correctly extract the original lower and upper quantization levels. By means of two-layer embedding, our method achieves higher embedding capacity while maintaining almost the same visual quality, compared with Malik et al.'s method. Experimental results also demonstrate our effectivity.