Reversible Data Hiding Scheme based on General Difference Expansion Cluster

Technological development leads to raising the number of digital image manipulation, especially in data security. One of the popular methods that can be used to maintain privacy is steganography. It is a technique used to hide secret messages into media such a text, image, audio, or video. Among the methods in steganography, Difference Expansion (DE), Reduced Difference Expansion (RDE), and Generalized Difference Expansion (GDE) are favored to implement. There are two main obstacles when applying this method; the first is the similarity between stego and the cover media; the second is the data capacity that can be accommodated by the cover media. Therefore, further development of these methods is needed. This research proposes applying pixel clusters based on General Difference Expansion Cluster (GDEC) to maintain the stego image quality and increase the embedding capacity. In terms of these evaluated parameters, the experiment results have proved that the proposed method can increase the average quality of each image by more than 4 dB and produces 4.00 bits per pixel (bpp).