A semi-fragile lossless data hiding scheme based on multi-level histogram shift in image integer wavelet transform domain

A semi-fragile lossless data hiding (LDH) Scheme based on histogram distribution shift in integer wavelet transform (IWT) domain is proposed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, the transform approximation image is divided into non-overlapping blocks. In each block, the differences between the neighboring elements are computed and a histogram is made on the difference values. The secret data are embedded into the blocks based on a multi-level shifting mechanism of the histogram. The proposed method enables the exact recovery of the original host signal upon extracting the embedded information, if the watermarked image is not affected by any other process. The performance of proposed scheme is evaluated with respect to imperceptibility, robustness, and data payload capacity by simulations. Comparing with the state-of-the-art known techniques, the proposed method performs a higher performance.