Lossless data hiding: Fundamentals, algorithms, and applications

Data hiding has recently been proposed as a promising technique for the purpose of information assurance, authentication, fingerprint, security, data mining, copyright protection, and so forth. By data hiding, pieces of information represented by some data are embedded in a cover medium in such a way that the resultant medium, often referred to as marked medium or stego medium, is perceived with no difference from the original cover medium. Many data hiding algorithms have been proposed in the past several years. As will be shown, in most cases, the cover medium will experience some permanent distortion due to data hiding and cannot be inverted back to the original medium. In the analogy to the classification of data compression algorithms, the vast majority of data hiding algorithms can be referred to as lossy data hiding.