Dual Stego-imaging Based Reversible Data Hiding Using Improved LSB Matching

Since the inception of the reversible data hiding (RDH) concept, it has been a compelling topic in the field of data hiding. Being reversible, it has the ability to restore the original image followed by the successful retrieval of the secret data, at the receiving side. The concept of the dual stego-image based RDH technique utilizes two identical images of the original image for concealing the secret data, has gained wide compliance. Therefore, someone with both the stego-images can only extract the concealed data. In this paper, two improved dual imaging based RDH techniques, such as (1) dual stego-image based pixel pair LSB matching with reversibility, and (2) dual stego-image based modified LSB matching with reversibility, are proposed. In technique 1, at first two mirrored images are obtained from the original image. Then, using the pair of two consecutive pixels from the original image, the mirrored images pixels are modified using LSB matching technique. Later, these pixel pairs are readjusted to ensure reversibility at the receiving side. Similarly, technique 2 utilizes each original pixel to generate two distinct stegopixels using modified LSB matching. The experimental result shows that the technique 1 maintains excellent peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 51.29 dB and 51.30 dB for the two stego-images with hiding capacity (HC) of 524288 bits. At the same time, technique 2 offers 51.19 dB and 49.44 dB of PSNR while exhibiting the equal HC. Further, investigation with various image quality assessment (IQA) metrics like quality index (QI), and structural similarity index (SSIIM) are proven to be competent over the other existing works considered in this paper. In addition, both the proposed techniques have shown excellent anti-steganalytic ability against RS and pixel difference histogram (PDH) attack.

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