Improved modification direction methods

The original exploiting modification direction (EMD) method proposed by Zhang and Wang is a novel data hiding technique which can achieve large embedding capacity with less distortion. The original EMD method can hide (2n+1)-ary numbers by modifying at most one least-significant bit (LSB) of n pixel values. The proposed methods in this paper, 2-EMD and EMD-2, modify at most two pixels of the LSB values. Efficiency of the proposed methods is shown theoretically and through experiments. The 2-EMD and EMD-2 can hide even larger numbers than the EMD with similar distortion under the same conditions. This paper shows that the EMD-2 is much better than the EMD, and slightly better than 2-EMD when n is 3, 4 and 5. The way to generate basis vector can be used for the generalization of the n-EMD and EMD-n where n > 1.