A high imperceptible data hiding technique using quorum function

In today’s digitalized age and generation, where there is need of secure storage and transmission of data, the need of hiding information becomes a pre-requisite. In like situations, when we desire to send across data through images, we require an algorithm that can embed maximum data without degrading the original visual quality of the image that is being sent. The data embedding and retrieval process can be classified as reversible or irreversible. In this paper, we propose a general data-embedding algorithm which utilises the quorum function and optimal bit change operation, thus improving the visual quality of the stego image and being computationally efficient. Quorum function is used to embed the secret data in an efficient manner. So as to implement the algorithm for reversible data-embedding, the original image is interpolated and the interpolated values are utilised. The efficiency of the proposed method has been tested on various benchmark images and images from USC-SIPI image database. Our proposed method guarantees a peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) value of more than 45 dB in all the test images. The result on comparison with the recent state of the art techniques shows the superiority of the proposed method in terms of visual quality and computational time.