A HDWT-based reversible data hiding method

This paper presents a reversible data hiding method which provides a high payload and a high stego-image quality. The proposed method transforms a spatial domain cover image into a frequency domain image using the Haar digital wavelet transform (HDWT) method, compresses the coefficients of the high frequency band by the Huffman (or arithmetic) coding method, and then embeds the compression data and the secret data in the high frequency band. Since the high frequency band incorporates less energy than other bands of an image, it can be exploited to carry secret data. Furthermore, the proposed method utilizes the Huffman (or arithmetic) coding method to recover the cover image without any distortion. The proposed method is simple and the experimental results show that the designed method can give a high hiding capacity with a high quality of stego-image.