Reversible Data Hiding in Palette Images

Abstract

Reversible data hiding (RDH) has been investigated for over two decades. Depending on the application scenario, it can be divided into RDH and reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI). Interestingly, almost all studies on RDH/RDHEI have been conducted on gray-scale images, and relatively few studies have been conducted on color images compared to those on gray-scale images. Moreover, very few studies have been undertaken on palette images as a widely used image format. For palette images in which pixels are not gray-scale levels but color table indexes, it is difficult to apply traditional RDH/RDHEI methods directly. Therefore, we propose a new framework for RDH/RDHEI specifically for palette images. This framework adds a route selection algorithm before the conventional RDH/RDHEI approach. To be specific, we propose a method named the shortest route with correlation and frequency selection to reorder the color table, followed by a correlation reconstruction of the remapped index image according to this color table. The experimental results show the improvement brought by our proposed route selection to the existing RDH/RDHEI methods in palette images.