Abstract: An effective data hiding method based on pixel value differencing (PVD) and modulus function (MF) PVD (MF-PVD) was proposed. MF-PVD method was derived by Wang et al in which the MF was employed to adjust the remainder of two pixels for data embedding and extraction. In the proposed method, a new remainder function in a more general form is defined by selecting proper parameters, in which an indeterminate equation is constructed and an optimal solution is applied to revise the pixels. This strategy leads to a significant image distortion reduction compared with the original method. The experiment reveals that, by preserving the original embedding capacity, the method provides better embedding efficiency than both MF-PVD and PVD methods.

Key words: pixel value differencing, modulus function, indeterminate equation, data embedding