Aiming to embed large amount of data while minimize the sum of costs of all changed pixels, a novel high capacity data hiding scheme based on (7, 4) Hamming code is realized by a family of algorithms. Firstly, n (n = 1, 2, 3) cover pixels are assigned to one set according to the payload. Then, 128 binary strings of length seven are divided into eight sets according to the syndrome of every binary string. Binary strings that share the same syndrome are classified into one set. Finally, a binary string in a certain set determined by the data to be embedded is chosen to modify some of the least significant bits of the n cover pixels. The experimental results demonstrate that the image quality of the proposed method with high embedding payload is superior to those of the related schemes.
Keywords: Data hiding; Embedding capacity; Hamming code; Image quality.