A Reversible Data Hiding Method Using Inverse S-Scan Order and Histogram Shifting

Secure delivery of secret data on the Internet is an important research topic in digital communications. Data encryption and steganography are two common techniques used for sending secret data over a public computer network. Steganography utilizes a digital medium as a cover in the delivery of secret data. For medical and military image applications, reversibility is an important requirement in data embedding method design. This paper presents a reversible data hidding method. The proposed method utilizes the inverse S-scan order, pixel segmentation, and histogram shifting strategies to embed secret data into a cover image. The experiment results indicate that the proposed method can further enhance the data embedding capacity as compared with the method by Li, et al.