A Novel Reversible Data Hiding with Skin Tone Smoothing Effect for Face Images

Abstract

In order to improve the visual quality of face images while embedding data reversibly, this paper proposes a novel reversible data hiding (RDH) with skin tone smoothing effect for face images. Firstly, data is embedded into the face images by RDH in color images. Then, the skin tone regions are extracted by an improved skin tone extraction algorithm. Lastly, the skin tone regions are smoothed by the proposed reversible smoothing skin tone algorithm. The experiments show that the visual quality of face images can be effectively improved after embedding the data comparing with other RDH methods and beautification algorithms.