Improved prediction error expansion and mirroring embedded samples for enhancing reversible audio data hiding

Many applications work by processing either small or big data, including sensitive and confidential ones, through computer networks like cloud computing. However, many systems are public and may not provide enough security mechanisms. Meanwhile, once the data are compromised, the security and privacy of the users will suffer from serious problems. Therefore, security protection is much required in various aspects, and one of how it is done is by embedding the data (payload) in another form of data (cover) such as audio. However, the existing methods do not provide enough space to accommodate the payload, so bigger data can not be taken; the quality of the respective generated data is relatively low, making it much different from its corresponding cover. This research works on these problems by improving a prediction error expansion-based algorithm and designing a mirroring embedded sample scheme. Here, a processed audio sample is forced to be as close as possible to the original one. The experimental results show that this proposed method produces a higher quality of stego data considering the size of the payloads. It achieves more than 100 dB, which is higher than that of the compared algorithms. Additionally, this proposed method is reversible, which means that both the original payload and the audio cover can be fully reconstructed.