Reversible data hiding based on two-dimensional histogram and generalized histogram shifting

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding (RDH) method based on a two-dimensional (2D) histogram and generalized histogram shifting (GHS). First, a cover image is decomposed into wavelet subbands using the integer-to-integer wavelet transform (I2I-WT). Then, the 2D histogram is generated by counting the occurrence frequency of the pair of wavelet coefficients. Here, the pair of wavelet coefficients denotes two wavelet coefficients located in the same position in the selected two subbands. In the last step, RDH based on GHS, which embeds the multilevel symbols in the cover image is applied. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a higher payload capacity than the conventional RDH methods.