A reversible data hiding scheme based on the Sudoku technique

Data hiding, also known as information hiding, plays an important role in information security for various purposes. Reversible data hiding is a technique that allows distortion-free recovery of both the cover image and the secret information. In this paper, we propose a new, reversible data hiding scheme that is based on the Sudoku technique and can achieve higher embedding capacity. The proposed scheme allows embedding more secret bits into a pair of pixels while guaranteeing the good quality of the stego-image. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme obtained higher embedding capacity than some other previous schemes. In addition, our proposed scheme maintained the good visual quality of the stego-image (i.e., PSNR > 46 dB), which outperforms some existing schemes. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.