ANALYZING THE FIRST DIFFERENCE VALUE OF INTEGER TRANSFORM FOR SECURING TRANSMITTED DATA

Digital technology development contributes much to the current technology, especially in image processing and communication technology. Data are converted into binary digits, manipulated, and transmitted through the Internet, whose security is a major issue in this context. Here, the data hiding technique is one of the methods to ensure data security during transmission by embedding them into a multimedia file such as an image. One of the existing methods is difference expansion, where information redundancy between pixels is exploited to carry private data. In previous studies, various integer transform schemes have been introduced. However, there is still a challenge to achieve an affordable embedding capacity and visual quality. This paper proposes difference integer transform schemes and adopts the reduced difference expansion to minimize the difference between original and stego images. This method selects zero, the minimum, or maximum pixel as the first difference to keep the base point for the other three differences. The outcomes prove that the proposed schemes perform well in payload and visual quality, where 196608 bits can be embedded to achieve around 41 dB and 34 dB for medical and non-medical (common) images, respectively.