Reversible Data Hiding in Block Truncation Coding Compressed Images Using Quantization Level Swapping and Shifting

The existing reversible data hiding methods for block truncation coding (BTC) compressed images often utilize difference expansion or histogram shifting technique for data embedment. Although these methods effectively embed data into the compressed codes, the embedding operations may swap the numerical order of the higher and lower quantization levels. Since the numerical order of these two quantization levels can be exploited to carry additional data without destroying the quality of decoded image, the existing methods cannot take the advantages of this property to embed data more efficiently. In this paper, we embed data by shifting the higher and lower quantization levels in opposite direction. Because the embedment does not change numerical order of quantization levels, we exploit this property to carry additional data without further reducing the image quality. The proposed method performs no-distortion embedding if the payload is small, and performs reversible data embedding for large payload. The experimental results show that the proposed method offers better embedding performance over prior works in terms of payload and image quality.