A side match oriented data hiding based on absolute moment block truncation encoding mechanism with reversibility

Owing to life style changes during COVID, communication channels were forced to change. Online services ramped up to replace traditional services. It became daily practice for most of us that documents, files, photos, and videos were transmitted through the internet and websites. Information security was one of the big issues requiring more and more attention. Researchers proposed various solutions including steganography, watermarking, and data hiding. Reversible data hiding (RDH) is a commonly and widely accepted method to secure information. A receiver can not only extract secret information from stego media but can also recover the original media. This study focuses on enhancing the embedding capacity based on a known scheme proposed by Chang et al. in 2017. The proposed scheme incorporates absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC). In addition to using the high and low values generated from AMBTC to hide information, we introduce a multi-pass index reordering method to embed data into the bitmap, further boosting the embedding capacity. We also apply the side match (SM) technique in the bitmap recovery process. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve embedding capacity.