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Interpolation based dual image reversible data hiding using trinary encoding

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Abstract

This work proposes a Dual Image Reversible Data Hiding (DIRDH) scheme using interpolation and trinary encoding of secret data. Trinary encoding shows promise because it encodes 3-bit binary data to 2-bit trinary data from the set {−1, 0, 1}. This can be directly used as shifts in the cover pixel values to embed the data without any further processing. The main issue is that the encoding generates similar codes for some combinations of binary bits and makes it necessary to use auxiliary data. Thus, the auxiliary data becomes very difficult to handle with increasing payloads and needs to be sent as a separate file to the receiver. The proposed scheme avoids this problem by using interpolation to create space for the secret data while completely eliminating the need for auxiliary data. The original image is first interpolated to create the cover image and the trinary encoding is used to generate the shifts. The shifts are added to the interpolated pixels to generate the stego image. The modification to the processing of the cover image helps to eliminate the location map completely. Results show that the stego images have an average Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 50.42 dB while improving the effective embedding capacity from 1.1 bits per pixel (bpp) to 1.2bpp. This is an improvement of about 9% over the previous trinary encoding schemes.

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Data availability

The images and data used in this paper are sourced from open-source datasets as mentioned in Section 4. The links to the datasets are provided in the Reference section on reference number [10, 34].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronics Engineering, VIT, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India

    Shounak Shastri & V. Thanikaiselvan

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Correspondence to V. Thanikaiselvan.

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Shastri, S., Thanikaiselvan, V. Interpolation based dual image reversible data hiding using trinary encoding. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 349–366 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15574-9

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