Histogram-shifting-imitated reversible data hiding

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel reversible data hiding scheme based on the histogram-shifting-imitated approach. Instead of utilizing the peak point of an image histogram, the proposed scheme manipulates the peak points of segments based on image intensity. The secret data can be embedded into the cover image by changing the peak point pixel value into other pixel value in the same segment. The proposed method uses a location map to guarantee the correct extraction of the secret data. Since the modification of the pixel value is limited within each segment, the quality of the stego image is only related to the size of the segmentation, which means after embedding data into the cover image, it can be reused to do the multi-layer data embedding while maintaining the high quality of the final stego image. The experimental results of comparison with other existing schemes demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme is superior to the others.