Protection of confidential color image information based on Reversible Data Hiding technique (PCCIRT)

During Recent days, huge importance is given to Reversible Data Hiding(RDH) techniques in images, since it assures the excellent feature of retrieving the original cover image information in a lossless manner after embedded secret information is extracted, while protecting the image contents confidentiality. This paper proposes a lossless data hiding scheme for color cover images with very important and confidential information content. This proposed method, exploits least computational complexity by using histogram shifting technique to hide secret bits in confused color cover image, where confusion in cover image is created by using Quad tree decomposition. There are number of data hiding techniques proposed to embed data like LSB, Discrete Cosine Transformation, Pixel value differencing, Discrete Fourier Transform etc into images. But the above mentioned techniques suffer from many limitations like less data hiding capacity, degradation in the quality of image and very less security for the secret information hidden. To have control over these limitations, this paper proposes an enhanced histogram shifting method for color images by embedding the secret information into three different planes of RGB image in such a way that, it not only improves the quality of image and also achieves high embedding capacity. The PSNR value of the proposed technique is better than previous data hiding methods. This scheme has been implemented for images of various sizes and a comparative study in terms of PSNR, MSE, Embedded Rate and Correlation factor is presented. The same methodology could be applied even for DICOM(Medical) color images.