A high capacity distortion-free data hiding algorithm for palette image

Data hiding techniques have extensive applications and have attracted much attention. However, one common drawback of virtually all current data hiding methods is the fact that the host image is inevitably and permanently distorted by some small amount of noise due to data hiding itself. Although the distortion is often quite small, it may not be acceptable for medical or military images. For these applications, the stego-image cannot have any distortion, a high capacity distortion-free data hiding algorithm for the palette image is proposed in this paper. By utilizing the color redundancy in the host image, the algorithm can embed large amount of information, which usually can reach more than 10% of size of the host image. Meanwhile, it can be guaranteed that no distortion is introduced to the host image during data hiding process.