Reversible data hiding scheme based on histogram shifting of n-bit planes

Abstract

In this paper, a reversible data hiding scheme is proposed based on histogram shifting of n-bit planes (nBPs). This scheme extracts nBPs from an 8-bit plane for each pixel to generate the bit plane truncation image (BPTI), and then block division is used in the BPTI. These operations can make the peak point of the block histogram more concentrated and improve the probability of the zero point in the block histogram. The histogram shifting method was used to embed secret bits into the peak point in each block. Note that this block was not utilized to embed secret bits if the zero point of a certain block did not exist, thus, there was no overflow or underflow in our scheme when the histogram was shifted. Our proposed scheme achieved higher hiding capacity than previous histogram-based schemes, and its visual quality was very satisfactory. The experimental results validated the expected merits of the proposed scheme.