Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Based on Image Inpainting

Abstract

Reversible/lossless image data hiding schemes provide the capability to embed secret information into a cover image where the original carrier can be totally restored after extracting the secret information. This work presents a high performance reversible image data hiding scheme especially in stego image quality control using image inpainting, an efficient image processing skill. Embeddable pixels chosen from a cover image are initialized to a fixed value as preprocessing for inpainting. Subsequently, these initialized pixels are repaired using inpainting technique based on partial differential equations (PDE). These inpainted pixels can be used to carry secret bits and generate a stego image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme produces low distortion stego images and it also provides satisfactory hiding capacity.