A hue preservation lossless contrast enhancement method with RDH for color images

Abstract

The contrast enhancement with reversible data hiding (CERDH) has become a hot topic in many fields. At present, most schemes applying CERDH methods to color images have the problem of color distortion. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a CERDH method for color images based on constant hue plane. It firstly separates the color images into min, mid and max channels. Then, a novel preprocessing is proposed to maintain the distribution of histogram for original image while vacate room for data hiding. After that, the mid channel is used for data hiding, and min and max channels are hue-preserved to avoid color distortion. Finally, the three channels compose a contrast-enhanced color image. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best enhanced results based on CIEDE2000 compared with the state-of-the-art methods, and color distortion is also greatly reduced.