Reversible data hiding for high dynamic range images using edge information

Abstract

In this work, a reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithm is proposed for high dynamic range (HDR) images containing an additional luminance channel. Since prediction accuracy is the key of RDH, we propose to embed data into HDR images by exploiting the edge information among the luminance channel and color channels to achieve accurate prediction and high embedding capacity. Besides, a new edge-directed order is presented to reduce the visual loss of the stego image. Various experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can hide more data into HDR images with less distortion than directly applying traditional RDH methods designed for low dynamic range (LDR) images. Compared to the current HDR hiding algorithms, the proposed method is not only reversible, but also achieves a tradeoff between embedding capacity and distortion.