A lossless robust data hiding scheme

This paper presents a lossless robust data hiding scheme. The original cover image can be recovered without any distortion after the hidden data have been extracted if the stego-image remains intact, and on the other hand, the hidden data can still be extracted correctly if the stego-image goes through JPEG compression to some extent. The proposed scheme divides a cover image into a number of non-overlapping blocks and calculates the arithmetic difference of each block. Bits are embedded into blocks by shifting the arithmetic difference values. The shift quantity and shifting rule are fixed for all blocks. and reversibility is achieved. Furthermore, owing to the separation of bit-0-zone and bit-1-zone as well as the particularity of arithmetic difference, minor alteration applying to the stego-image generated by non-malicious attacks such as JPEG compression will not cause the bit-0-zone and the bit-1-zone to overlap, and robustness is achieved. Experimental results show that, compared with previous works, the performance of the proposed scheme is significantly improved. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.