Data Hiding in Halftone Images by XOR Block-Wise Operation with Difference Minimization

This paper presents an improved XOR-based Data Hiding Scheme (XDHS) to hide a halftone image in more than two halftone stego images. The hamming weight and hamming distance is a very important parameter affecting the quality of a halftone image. For this reason, we proposed a method that involves minimizing the hamming weights and hamming distances between the stego image and cover image in 2x2-pixel grids. Moreover, our XDHS adopts a block-wise operation to improve the quality of a halftone image and stego images. Furthermore, our scheme improves security by using a block-wise operation with A-patterns and B-patterns. Our XDHS method achieves a high quality with good security compared to the prior arts. An experiment verified the superiority of our XDHS compared with previous methods.