An optimal high capacity reversible data hiding scheme using move to front coding for LZW codes

Reversible Data hiding techniques reduce transmission cost as secret data is embedded into a cover image without increasing its size in such a way that at the receiving end, both secret data and the cover image can be extracted and recovered, respectively, to their original form. To further reduce the transmission cost, the secret data can be embedded in the compression codes by some popular reversible data hiding schemes. One of the popular and important reversible data hiding method is high- performance data-hiding Lempel–Ziv–Welch (HPDH-LZW) scheme which hides the secret data in LZW codes. In this paper, the HPDH-LZW scheme is modified in order to increase its hiding capacity and compression ratio. First, the proposed work modifies the Move to Front (MTF) encoding technique to hide the secret data and also to increase the similarity among the element of the cover media. Then, LZW encoding technique is applied on the resultant cover data to obtain LZW codes, which are used to hide further secret data. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has significantly increased the data hiding capacity and have good embedding and extraction speed in comparison to other state of the art schemes.