Manuscript received May 20, 2025; revised June 19, 2025; accepted July 23, 2025; published November 25, 2025.

Abstract—Repeatable data hiding enables multiple embedding operations on digital images without accumulating distortion. However, existing frameworks reset all the Least Significant Bits (LSBs) to zero for embedding cost assignment. This discards LSB information, reducing imperceptibility. This paper proposes an improved method that achieves distortion invariance without full LSB-zeroing. Instead, it selectively resets only a portion of LSBs, generating a partial LSB-zeroed image. This preserves the original LSB values in non-modifiable regions. By ranking pixels based on embedding costs derived from the partial LSB-zeroed image, our method ensures the same set of pixels is consistently modified across multiple embeddings. As a result, both repeatability and improved imperceptibility are achieved.

Keywords—data hiding, repeatable, imperceptibility

Cite: Yipeng Liu and Zichi Wang, "An Improved Method for Repeatable Data Hiding," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 13, No. 6, pp. 621-629, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY-4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.