Improved histogram shifting-based data hiding method with alternative skipping method for image retrieval

Abstract

In the system security technology, the information hiding field is developed as technologies for embedding information into digital content as media. The proposed technique is a technical steganography technique which uses a technique of information hiding through physical / statistical change of signal of contents. In the digital watermarking or steganography technology, the embedding process is frequently performed in the frequency domain in order to increase the latent capacity and to improve the image quality. However, these methods have a disadvantage that the computation complexity is high and the constraint condition becomes complicated. In the contrast, there have been various studies based on histogram shifting technology in reversible information hiding. Assume it selects multiple peaks on the histogram shifting, the capacity of data concealment gradually increased by applying multiple peak histogram method. The steganography technique using histogram shifting doesn’t show any significant improvement for the hiding capacity and image quality in the early methods. In this paper, we analyze the effect of information hiding technology in terms of adopting the histogram shift method including skipping. In addition, we propose 2n divergence data hiding as a complimentary technique to improve hiding capacity. The proposed method has been proven through an example using mathematical expressions, and further improvement measures could be derived.