An improved capacity data hiding technique based on image interpolation

Data hiding in multimedia objects such as text, images, audio and video clips is a technique that has been widely used to achieve security for applications requiring copyright protection, covert communication, and tampering detection. Data hiding can be irreversible or reversible, where the latter is used to ensure exact recovery of the media object after extracting the hidden data. Different approaches to achieve reversible data hiding have been proposed. One of the approaches is the interpolation-based data hiding which has been proposed to achieve high data hiding capacity. This paper presents a new computationally simple interpolation-based data hiding technique that increases data hiding capacity and limits the cover image distortion that is caused by the two major steps of interpolation-based techniques; the downscaling/expansion step and the data hiding step . Image distortion reduction in the downscaling/expansion step is achieved by using a new image interpolation algorithm, whereas the image distortion in the data hiding step is reduced utilizing a new adjustable data hiding algorithm, which adaptively adjusts the level of tradeoff between data hiding capacity and image quality. The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated for data hiding capacity and image quality using three metrics: peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), weighted PSNR (WPSNR), and structural similarity index (SSIM). The data hiding capacity achieved by the proposed technique can be as high as 1.7bpp, which is higher by 8.5 to 72% as compared to similar techniques. Moreover, for the data hiding step, the proposed algorithm achieved high quality images as reflected by values up to 54 dB for PSNR, 78 dB for WPSNR, and 0.9998 for SSIM.