Data hiding method for color AMBTC compressed images using color difference

Abstract

Image compression technology and copyright protection are certainly the important technologies for free exchange of multimedia. For compression of an image, we propose a color Absolute Moment Block Trucation Coding (AMBTC) method using a common bit-plane created by k-means. In addition, a data hiding method based on a color AMBTC using Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process (OPAP) was proposed for copyright protection and confidential secret communication. The number of quantization levels of the proposed color AMBTC is nine per block. Therefore, the edge of the compressed color image can be expressed more delicately. As a result of the simulation, it can be seen that the edge of the image of the color AMBTC is close to the original image. Moreover, the data hiding performance of the proposed method also obtained excellent results. For the experiment, we measured the quality of the image using the Color Difference (CD) we proposed, and the measurement result was very satisfactory.