Optimal lossless data hiding using selective block manipulation based on local characteristics

In this paper, a lossless data hiding method is proposed employing selective block modification to achieve efficient solution in terms of low visual degradation and high embedding capacity. In the area of information hiding, "lossless data hiding" means the reversibility of the original image after secret data extraction. Main contribution of the proposed method is to adopt the variance value of each block for deciding the embedding options. By adopting this value, we can decrease the image degradation after data embedding and avoid blocks which can cause serious image distortion.