Distortion less reversible data hiding based on dual repeat accumulate coding technique

The reversible data hiding hides the secret data into an image and the secret data, the original image is recovered without data loss. In this paper, we proposed a reversible steganographic method using repeat accumulate coding. The secret information is embedded using compression codes. This paper presents a dual tree repeat accumulate coding based image-hiding scheme that embeds secret data into compression codes during image compression. The proposed algorithm is implemented in two phases, an embedding stage and extracting stage. The secret data is embedded into the difference values of a given image after the calculation stage is performed. The proposed scheme effectively provides a lossless hiding mechanism in the compression domain. During the repeat accumulate coding stage the hiding tree is used to embed the secret information. Secret data can be extracted by referring to the same hiding-tree. The cover image can be recovered during the repeat accumulate decoding stage. It is shown that the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) obtained in the proposed algorithm is above 50 dB. The results achieved in this method are higher when compared to the other latest reversible data hiding techniques mentioned in the literature. The proposed method has been tested with benchmarked images used to test. This method improves data hiding performance in terms of hiding capacity and visual perceptibility. The performance comparison is done with other reversible data hiding methods to prove the proposed method.