Forensic Enforcement Research Articles

Reversible watermarking in JPEG images based on modified RZL codes and histogram shift

Reversible watermarking has extensive applications in fields such as medical data management and forensic enforcement. In this article, we propose a modified reverse zero-run length (RZL) coding method for reversible watermarking, which introduces fewer modifications to cover than previous ones under the same embedding rate. By combining the coding method with histogram shift and quantization table modification strategy, we propose a novel reversible data hiding algorithm for JPEG images. Compared with previous art, when embedding the same payload, our method has an improvement of at least 2 dB in stego image’s quality, which proves the effectiveness and advantage of our algorithm.