Abstract
Grayscale-invariant reversible data hiding (RDH) in color images was developed recently in which the grayscales of the marked color image are required to be the same as that of the host color image. Recently, some grayscale-invariant RDH schemes were proposed but their performance on embedding capacity and distortion is not satisfactory due to the large number of correction bits generated for losslessly recovering the host green scales. In this work, we propose a grayscale-invariant RDH method which reduces the need for correction bits. We design a self-correcting mechanism which modifies the green scales for keeping grayscales unchanged while remembering the information of the host green scales. To obtain this task, we observe that all previous methods generated correction bits in a functional approach which results in many correction bits. Instead of the functional approach, we use a relational approach to preserve the grayscales. By this approach, the proposed algorithm only has to generate a small number of correction bits for recovering green scales. Moreover, this relational approach allows the algorithm to embed more message bits into some green scales. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the embedding capacity and the rate-distortion performance compared to previous works.
Highlights
R EVERSIBLE data hiding (RDH) is a technique which embeds a secret message into an image such that, from the embedded image, one can extract the embedded secret message and recover the original image without any distortion
Some RDH algorithms for color images are proposed [1], [6], [12], [17] and their goals aim to explore more correlations within three color channels in order to generate a sharper histogram of prediction errors and minimize the distortion of the marked images
When these RDH algorithms cause some modification for the host image, they may not preserve some important properties of the host color image such as its grayscale
Summary
R EVERSIBLE data hiding (RDH) is a technique which embeds a secret message into an image such that, from the embedded image, one can extract the embedded secret message and recover the original image without any distortion. Some RDH algorithms for color images are proposed [1], [6], [12], [17] and their goals aim to explore more correlations within three color channels in order to generate a sharper histogram of prediction errors and minimize the distortion of the marked images. When these RDH algorithms cause some modification for the host image, they may not preserve some important properties of the host color image such as its grayscale. There are many applications for the gray version of color images including black and white
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