Reversible image steganographic scheme via predictive coding

The reversible image steganographic scheme in this study provides the ability to embed secret data into a host image and then recover the host image without losing any information when the secret data is extracted. In this paper, a reversible image steganographic scheme based on predictive coding is proposed by embedding secret data into compression codes during the lossless image compression. The proposed scheme effectively provides a lossless hiding mechanism in the compression domain. During the predictive coding stage, the proposed scheme embeds secret data into error values by referring to a hiding-tree. In an entropy decoding stage, the secret data can be extracted by referring to the hiding-tree, and the host image can be recovered during the predictive decoding stage. The experimental results show that the average hiding capacity of the proposed scheme is 0.992 bits per pixel (bpp), and the host image can be reconstructed without losing any information when the secret data is extracted. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved