A Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Based on Code Division Multiplexing

Abstract

In this paper, a novel code division multiplexing (CDM) algorithm-based reversible data hiding (RDH) scheme is presented. The covert data are denoted by different orthogonal spreading sequences and embedded into the cover image. The original image can be completely recovered after the data have been extracted exactly. The Walsh Hadamard matrix is employed to generate orthogonal spreading sequences, by which the data can be overlappingly embedded without interfering each other, and multilevel data embedding can be utilized to enlarge the embedding capacity. Furthermore, most elements of different spreading sequences are mutually cancelled when they are overlappingly embedded, which maintains the image in good quality even with a high embedding payload. A location-map free method is presented in this paper to save more space for data embedding, and the overflow/underflow problem is solved by shrinking the distribution of the image histogram on both the ends. This would further improve the embedding performance. Experimental results have demonstrated that the CDM-based RDH scheme can achieve the best performance at the moderate-to-high embedding capacity compared with other state-of-the-art schemes.