Recently, among various data hiding techniques, a new subset, lossless data hiding, has received increasing interest. Most of the existing lossless data hiding algorithms are, however, fragile in the sense that the hidden data cannot be extracted out correctly after compression or other incidental alteration has been applied to the stego-image. The only existing semi-fragile (referred to as robust in this paper) lossless data hiding technique, which is robust against high-quality JPEG compression, is based on modulo-256 addition to achieve losslessness. In this paper, we first point out that this technique has suffered from the annoying salt-and-pepper noise caused by using modulo-256 addition to prevent overflow/underflow. We then propose a novel robust lossless data hiding technique, which does not generate salt-and-pepper noise. By identifying a robust statistical quantity based on the patchwork theory and employing it to embed data, differentiating the bit-embedding process based o...
Zhicheng Ni, Yun Q. Shi, Nirwan Ansari, Wei Su, Qi