A reversible data hiding scheme based on the Sudoku technique

•Sudoku technique is used for data embedding.•A reversible data hiding scheme that is based on the Sudoku technique and can achieve the higher embedding capacity.•The reference matrix is built and applied to obtain better embedding capacity.•The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme obtained higher embedding capacity than some other previous schemes.•The proposed scheme also achieved more consistent results for the different test images.

Data hiding, also known as information hiding, plays an important role in information security for various purposes. Reversible data hiding is a technique that allows distortion-free recovery of both the cover image and the secret information. In this paper, we propose a new, reversible data hiding scheme that is based on the Sudoku technique and can achieve higher embedding capacity. The proposed scheme allows embedding more secret bits into a pair of pixels while guaranteeing the good quality of the stego-image. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme obtained higher embedding capacity than some other previous schemes. In addition, our proposed scheme maintained the good visual quality of the stego-image (i.e., PSNR > 46 dB), which outperforms some existing schemes.