A Matrix Coding-Oriented Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Using Dual Digital Images

Abstract

With the development of Internet technology, information security and data protection have become particularly important. Reversible data hiding is an effective technique for data integrity and privacy protection, and secret image sharing is a distinct research field within reversible data hiding. Due to the ability of sharing secret information between two receivers and the larger embedding capacity compared to the traditional reversible data hiding scheme, dual digital images have also attracted extensive research in the past decade. In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding scheme based on matrix coding using dual digital images. By modifying the bits in the pixels, we can conceal three bits of the secret message in two pixels. In other words, the embedding rate reaches 1.5 bits per pixel (bpp). The experimental results demonstrate that our method has a significantly larger embedding capacity of 786,432 bits compared to previous similar methods while still maintaining acceptable image quality defined by a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) greater than 30 dB. The proposed scheme is suitable for applications required to pass a large amount of data but with minor security of image quality to be visually acceptable.