Abstract: This paper proposes a new data hiding scheme for halftone images. The original image is divided into two parts: host pixels for carrying secret data and slave pixels for avoiding degradation of visual quality respectively. The secret data is embedded in the host pixels using the Hamming code with high embedding efficiency. Each host pixel is toggled with one slave pixel, and an inverse flip on the slave pixel is used to keep the visual quality. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms some previous schemes.

Key words: halftone image, Hamming code, slave pixel, visual quality