A High Capacity Data Hiding Scheme Using
Modified AMBTC Compression Technique
Aruna Malik, Geeta Sikka,
and Harsh Verma
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Dr B R
Ambedkar National Institute of Technology, India
Abstract: In this paper, a data hiding scheme is proposed which modifies the Absolute
Moment Block Truncation Coding (AMBTC) technique to embed a large amount of
secret data. This scheme employs a user-defined threshold value to classify the
AMBTC compressed blocks as complex block and smooth block. In the case of smooth
blocks, the bit plane is replaced with the secret data bits. Later, the
quantization levels are re-calculated so that distortion is minimized. While
for complex blocks, the bit plane is reconstructed in which every pixel is
represented by two bits instead of just one bit. Now, the
secret data is embedded into the first LSB of the bit plane. Finally,
four new quantization levels are calculated for preserving the closeness of the
resultant block to the original block. Thus, the proposed scheme is able to
utilize each and every pixel of the cover image to hide the secret data while
maintaining the image quality. This scheme achieves 1 bit per pixel data hiding
capacity for every image. Experimental results show that
our scheme is superior to the other existing schemes in terms of both hiding
capacity and image quality.
Keywords: Data hiding, quantization
level, secret data, stego-image, absolute moment block truncation coding.