An efficient general data hiding scheme based on image interpolation

Information exchange through public networks has the risk of information disclosure, making data hiding an important technique to protect privacy. Image interpolation is also a common technique in image processing. Recent years, research on data hiding based on image interpolation have matured. In this paper, we propose an efficient data hiding scheme based on image interpolation that can be adopted into different image interpolation techniques. Different from other schemes, the converted decimal secret data is embedded into the cover image by adding or subtracting the cover pixels according to whether the current pixel value is lower or higher than the original pixel value and is embedded following the block complexity from high to low. Therefore, our proposed scheme keeps a relative balance between hiding capacity and image quality that can increase the stego-image quality and obtain a relatively higher image quality when the embedded bits are lower. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme has a relatively higher hiding capacity and can achieve almost a 1.6 dB increase on average compared with other schemes. The visual effect is also superior under the different image interpolation techniques.