A New Data Hiding Method Using Adaptive Quantization & Dynamic Bit Plane Based AMBTC

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel data hiding method using adaptive quantization & dynamic bit plane based AMBTC technique. In the proposed method, initially, a cover image is partitioned into a set of non-overlapping blocks, then adaptive number of quantization levels and size of the bit-plane for each block is determined, using the complexity level. The secret data is concealed into the bit-planes of the blocks according to their tolerance capability. The secret data is embedded via simple bit replacement strategy. The dynamic categorization of image blocks and determination of number of quantization levels along with the size of bit-planes have significantly contributed in providing high quality marked-image while maintain the same bit-rate. Further, the proposed scheme provides high data hiding capacity as almost every block is being used for hiding the secret data. It is clearly evident from the experimental results that proposed method performs significantly better than the conventional AMBTC based data hiding methods for the hiding capacity and image quality trade-off, without any change in required bit-rate.