Reversible data hiding

TLDR

The paper proposes a novel reversible data hiding algorithm that allows distortion‑free recovery of the original image after data extraction. The method embeds data by shifting pixel gray levels at histogram zero or minimum points, and its performance is validated through experiments and comparisons with existing schemes. The algorithm achieves higher data capacity than many existing reversible data hiding methods, guarantees a PSNR above 48 dB—well above prior techniques—while maintaining low complexity and fast execution across a diverse set of images, including 1096 CorelDraw images.

Abstract

A novel reversible data hiding algorithm, which can recover the original image without any distortion from the marked image after the hidden data have been extracted, is presented in this paper. This algorithm utilizes the zero or the minimum points of the histogram of an image and slightly modifies the pixel grayscale values to embed data into the image. It can embed more data than many of the existing reversible data hiding algorithms. It is proved analytically and shown experimentally that the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the marked image generated by this method versus the original image is guaranteed to be above 48 dB. This lower bound of PSNR is much higher than that of all reversible data hiding techniques reported in the literature. The computational complexity of our proposed technique is low and the execution time is short. The algorithm has been successfully applied to a wide range of images, including commonly used images, medical images, texture images, aerial images and all of the 1096 images in CorelDraw database. Experimental results and performance comparison with other reversible data hiding schemes are presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.