An Improved Reversible Data Hiding Technique for Secret Data Sharing

Data hiding is one of the prominent approaches for sharing confidential information. Recently, Singh and Singh have discussed a reversible data hiding technique that has a very good data hiding rate of 2.24 bits per pixel, and it can provide the secret data and cover media both in their original forms at the receiver end. We analyse this technique and find that its embedding rate can further be increased without disturbing its basic characteristics. It increases the size of the cover image by inserting a row between two rows and a column between two columns, and the inserted pixels are assigned the average values of their neighbouring image pixels. This method does not utilize all the inserted pixels to embed the secret data. In our proposed method, we use all the inserted pixels to embed the secret information, and its data hiding rate is 2.74 bits per pixel (bpp).