Data hiding in error diffused color halftone images

Halftone image watermarking has been explored and developed rapidly over the past decade. However, there are still issues to be studied. This paper presents a data hiding method called Data Hiding by Dual Color Conjugate Error Diffusion (DHDCCED) to hide a binary secret pattern into two error diffused color halftone images, such that when the two color halftone images are overlaid, the secret pattern will be revealed. The experimental results show that DHDCCED can significantly improve the performances when comparing both the correct decoding rate and the visual quality of the revealed secret pattern to the existing method Color Conjugate Error Diffusion (CCED).