High-payload image hiding with quality recovery using tri-way pixel-value differencing

This paper presents a practical method of using a cover image to hide one larger image or several images the same size as the cover image. The secret image is compressed by JPEG2000 and then embedded in the cover image using tri-way pixel-value differencing. The secret image can be extracted from the cover image, although its quality will be reduced due to the high compression ratio of JPEG2000 used to meet the payload requirements of the stego-image. Residual value coding is proposed to reduce the distortion in the recovered secret image. The goal of the proposed approach is to provide secrecy while avoiding detection by dual statistics steganalysis. Experimental results show that this approach successfully draws a secret image imperceptibly and reconstructs the recovered secret image with high quality. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.