An Adaptive Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for JPEG Images

Abstract

Currently JPEG is the most popular image file format and the majority of images are stored in JPEG format due to storage constraint. Recently, reversible data hiding (RDH) for JPEG images draws researchers attention and has been developed rapidly. Due to the compression, performing RDH on a typical JPEG image is much more difficult than that on an uncompressed image. In this paper, we propose an adaptive reversible data hiding method for JPEG images, which is based on histogram shifting. We propose to select the optimal expandable bins-pair at image level by adopting a k-th nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm. By developing a new block selection strategy, we can adaptively select the to-be-embedded blocks. Then, the message bits are embedded into the selected blocks at a specific bins-pair via the histogram shifting algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve a higher image quality and a less increased file size compared to the current state-of-the-art RDH method for JPEG images.