A Space Increased Reversible Information Hiding Technique by Reducing Redundant Recording

Abstract

This paper proposes improvements to the reversible hiding technique proposed in by Hong et al. in 2012. The proposed technique is based on the characteristics of the human visual on neighboring pixel values to obtain the average for calculating the minimum value of just noticeable difference (JND). The JND is then used to determine the suitable embedding level to decrease image distortion. Hong et al.’s method will first shift pixels that caused overflow and underflow after finding the suitable embedding level. The values of the shifted pixel will be recorded in a location map the size of an image. The binary location map was JBIG2 compressed and embedded with the secret information. In the location map, pixels not shifted were recorded as 0. Therefore, many pixels were recorded. These resulted in the compressed length to be longer which affects the payload size. Experimental results showed that our proposed method decreases the size of the location map, payload is increased but the image quality is maintained similar to Hong et al.’s method.