Lossless data hiding for absolute moment block truncation coding using histogram modification

This paper presents a lossless data hiding method for an absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC) images, which is a compressed grayscale image. It is not easy to hide secret data in an AMBTC-compressed image because it is composed of bit planes. Thus, it is very sensitive to change some pixels. Nevertheless, to improve the hiding capacity, we present an efficient extension of the histogram modification technique by counting the coefficients of the bit planes in each 4 x 4 block. In addition, our proposed scheme has low complexity and achieves a high embedding capacity with the good perceptual quality compared to the prior arts. In an experiment, we verified our proposed data hiding scheme through the comparison with previous methods.