Data Hiding in Halftone Images Using Adaptive Noise-Balanced Error Diffusion and Quality-Noise Look Up Table

This study presents a reasonable computational complexity watermarking algorithm to embed hidden pattern into two or more halftone images with adaptive noise-balanced error diffusion (ANBEDF). One halftone image is obtained by traditional error diffusion, and the others are obtained by ANBEDF. The visual decoded hidden pattern can be detected when the similar error-diffused images are overlaid each other. Better decoded result can be obtained by a simple XNOR operation. The proposed method employs the trained quality-noise look up Table (QNLUT) and the optimized multipliers to control the adaptive noise strength according to the local variance value. The experimental results show that higher decoding rate is available under the same image quality performance as former approaches reported in the literature.