High quality PVM based reversible data hiding method for digital images

In recent years, transmitting and sharing multimedia data across the Internet have raised up many data security issues such as copyright and contents protection due to the communication channel (network) which is often insecure. Therein, the need for new data hiding security mechanisms like steganography has become a necessity. Steganography is the art and science of veiling the existence of the private message while keeping the communication invisible. To exploit this feature, a new reversible data hiding method based on pixel value modification (PVM) that allows secret data to be veiled into the carrier image is introduced in this paper. The proposed method employs the logarithmic predictor and the reference pixel to control the embedding process while the key indicator is used to record the position and the operations performed on each pixel. The embedded confidential data and the original carrier image can be reconstructed without any degradation. Besides, the experimental results, analysis and comparisons demonstrate that the quality of the stego image is better than those of existing methods.