Improved Data Hiding in Halftone Images with Cooperating Pair Toggling Human Visual System

摘要

An improved data hiding in halftone images with cooperating pair toggling human visual system is presented in this paper. An objective halftone image quality evaluation method based on the human visual system obtained by Least-Mean-Square (LMS) is also introduced. By rigorously searching the optimum toggled pixels with the proposed human visual LMS-trained filter, the proposed method is proven to be superior to the Data Hiding Smart Pair Toggling, proposed by Fu and Au [Fu and Au, IEEE Trans Image Process 11 (2002), 477-484], in image quality under a number of tested halftone images. The tested halftone images include ordered dithering [Ulichney, Digital Halftoning (1987)], Floyd error diffusion [Floyd and Steinberg, An adaptive algorithm for spatial gray scale (1975) 36-37], Jarvis error diffusion [Jarvis et al., Comp Graph Image Proc 5 (1976), 13-40], and Stucki error diffusion images. Moreover, the proposed method offers high embedded capacity, and it is flexible to deal with different capacity applications.