Adaptive lossless steganographic scheme with centralized difference expansion

In this paper, a novel adaptive lossless data hiding scheme is presented that is capable of offering greater embedding capacity than the existing schemes. Unlike the fixed hiding capacity each block provides in most of the currently available lossless data hiding approaches, the proposed method utilizes a block-based lossless data embedding algorithm where the quantity of the hidden information each block bears is variable. To both reduce the image distortion and increase the hiding capacity, the payload of each block depends on its cover image complexity. Due to the fact that schemes with difference expansion tend to damage the image quality seriously in the edge areas, in the proposed scheme, smoother areas are chosen to conceal more secret bits. This way, a better balance can be reached between the embedding ratio and the stego-image quality. In addition, when recovered the cover image can came back to its old self to the last bit without any distortion at all. Experimental results, as this paper will show, have demonstrated that the proposed method is capable of hiding more secret data while maintaining imperceptible stego-image quality degradation.