Reversible data hiding in absolute moment block truncation coding compressed images using adaptive multilevel histogram shifting technique

Abstract

Due to advancement in communication technology, data are transmitted over the network which is either confidential or private. So, the information security is one of the most critical factors considered when secret data is transmitted between two parties. Another important issue is the bandwidth utilisation for data transmission. Image steganography is a widely used technique for data hiding. It is used in critical applications like military and medical areas. Most of the work is done in uncompressed images, which leads to high storage and large bandwidth required for transmission. Keeping these two factors in mind, this paper presents the multilevel histogram shifting technique in the compressed domain with the addition of adaptive block division scheme to improve the embedding capacity as well as reduce the utilisation of the bandwidth. In this method, absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) compression technique has been used for compression because of its good compression ratio.