Dual image based secured reversible data hiding scheme exploiting huffman compression tree combining bit-reversal permutation technique

In the area of data hiding and information security, the greater need is to ensure high embedding capacity of the stego media without hampering the visual quality while ensuring the tightest possible security. Now, it has become one of the biggest challenge to meet all these requirements. Embedding secret messages in dual images is one of the latest techniques that aims to cater such needs. However, there are very few data hiding schemes that are currently using dual images, but are suffering from several shortcomings, such as security loophole and poor visual quality with limited hiding capacity. In this paper, a dual image-based reversible data hiding scheme has been proposed where multiple bits can be embedded within a pair of pixels dynamically by Huffman compression where different pseudo codes are generated for different chunk of secret bits which are embedded by Bit-Reversal Permutation (BRP) and X-OR operations. Finally, pixels are interchanged between the dual images based on odd-even properties of the pixel values. The functional efficiency of the proposed scheme is evaluated by comparing the relevant parameters of different state-of-the-art schemes. It is established that the proposed scheme provides more than 64 dB PSNR value on average after embedding a maximum of 3, 27, 680 bits of secret data which ensures good visual quality and high embedding capacity as compared to other state-of-the-art schemes thereby benefitting innumerable applications across public and private sectors.