Reversible data hiding: Advances in the past two decades

TLDR

Reversible data hiding has evolved into a vibrant research field over the past twenty years, with growing interest and anticipated continued advancement. This review categorizes RDH techniques into six domains—image spatial, image compressed, semi‑fragile authentication, contrast enhancement, encrypted image, and audio/video—and surveys their development, current state, and future directions. The increasing number of papers across diverse RDH topics confirms the field’s rapid growth.

Abstract

In the past two decades, reversible data hiding (RDH), also referred to as lossless or invertible data hiding, has gradually become a very active research area in the field of data hiding. This has been verified by more and more papers on increasingly wide-spread subjects in the field of RDH research that have been published these days. In this paper, the various RDH algorithms and researches have been classified into the following six categories: 1) RDH into image spatial domain; 2) RDH into image compressed domain (e.g., JPEG); 3) RDH suitable for image semi-fragile authentication; 4) RDH with image contrast enhancement; 5) RDH into encrypted images, which is expected to have wide application in the cloud computation; and 6) RDH into video and into audio. For each of these six categories, the history of technical developments, the current state of the arts, and the possible future researches are presented and discussed. It is expected that the RDH technology and its applications in the real word will continue to move ahead.