An improved reversible information hiding scheme based on AMBTC compressed images

This paper proposes an efficient reversible information hiding method based on AMBTC compressed images. At present, most digital images are stored and transmitted in compressed form, so research and development of such a scheme is necessary. Hong et al. proposed a reversible information hiding based approach based on AMBTC compression of images to provide considerable embedding capacity and effectively reduce the bit-rate. However, it did not carry out a detailed categorization of the error value or adopt the most suitable method for category information encoding, where error value is the difference of the original quantization value and the prediction quantization value. So there’s possibility to reduce the bit-rate. In this paper, we propose an Improved Centralized Error Division (ICED) technique to conduct a more detailed categorization of the error value. In addition, we also adopt an optimal Huffman code to encode category information, so as to further reduce the bit-rate. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach has an equal embedding capacity as Hong et al.’s method and is higher than other relevant work. In addition, the proposed scheme has a lower bit-rate than Hong et al.’s method.