EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2002 (2002), Issue 2, Pages 152-163
doi:10.1155/S1110865702000550

Compressive Data Hiding: An Unconventional Approach for Improved Color Image Coding

Patrizio Campisi,1 Deepa Kundur,2 Dimitrios Hatzinakos,2 and Alessandro Neri1

 1Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettronica, Universitá degli Studi di Roma “Roma Tre,”, Via della Vasca Navale 84, Roma 00146, Italy
2Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto M5S 3G4, Ontario, Canada
Received 30 April 2001; Revised 14 September 2001

Abstract

Traditionally, data hiding and compression have had contradictory goals. The former problem adds perceptually irrelevant information in order to embed data, while the latter removes this irrelevancy and redundancy to reduce storage requirements. In this paper, we use data hiding to help improve signal compression. We take an unconventional approach and consider “piggy-backing” the color information on the luminance component of an image for improved color image coding. Our new technique essentially transforms a given color image into the YIQ color space where the chrominance information is subsampled and embedded in the wavelet domain of the luminance component. Our technique can be used as preprocessing to improve the performance of popular image compression schemes such as SPIHT that are optimized for grayscale image compression. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed technique in comparison to JPEG and straightforward SPIHT.