*Article* **An Adaptive Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Using AMBTC and Quantization Level Difference**

**Yan-Hong Chen 1, Chin-Chen Chang 2,3, Chia-Chen Lin 4,\* and Zhi-Ming Wang <sup>2</sup>**


**Abstract:** Hiding a message in compression codes can reduce transmission costs and simultaneously make the transmission more secure. This paper presents an adaptive reversible data hiding scheme that is able to provide large embedding capacity while improving the quantity of modified images. The proposed scheme employs the quantization level difference (QLD) and interpolation technique to adaptively embed the secret information into pixels of each absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC)-compressed block, except for the positions of two replaced quantization levels. The values of QLD tend to be much larger in complex areas than in smooth areas. In other words, our proposed method can obtain good performance for embedding capacity and still meets the requirement for better modified image quality when the image is complex. The performance of the proposed approach was compared to previous image hiding methods. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms referenced approaches.

**Keywords:** quantization level difference; AMBTC; reversible data hiding; high capacity

**Citation:** Chen, Y.-H.; Chang, C.-C.; Lin, C.-C.; Wang, Z.-M. An Adaptive Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Using AMBTC and Quantization Level Difference. *Appl. Sci.* **2021**, *11*, 635. https://doi.org/10.3390/ app11020635

Received: 29 November 2020 Accepted: 28 December 2020 Published: 11 January 2021

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