High Capacity Data Hiding Scheme for DCT-based Images

To enhance the hiding capacity of DCT-based images, in this paper we propose a new data hiding scheme based on a notation transformation concept. Without considering the reversibility function, experimental results confirm that the hiding capacity provided by our designed data hiding strategy is not only higher than that provided by the Iwata et al.’s, Chang et al.’s and Lin et al.’s schemes but also Lin and Shiu’s scheme. Moreover, the image quality of stego-images with our proposed scheme remains above 30 dB for most test images when the hiding capacity is above 90000 bits, which is better than the best image quality offered by existing DCT-based loss or lossless data hiding schemes. Our proposed scheme also inherits the advantage of DCT-based data hiding scheme; that is the security of the hidden data is guaranteed because the secret data is embedded into DCT coefficients of the cover image. Based on the results of our proposed scheme, our future work is to add the reversibility function back into the data hiding scheme to expand the applications of our proposed scheme.