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Local complexity based adaptive embedding mechanism for reversible data hiding in digital images

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Abstract

In this paper, a reversible data hiding scheme for digital images with high hiding capacity is proposed. Original image is segmented into smooth and rough regions based on local complexity. In order to achieve higher hiding capacity, we embed three bits into each pixel belonging to smooth region with lower local complexity and one bit is embedded into each pixel of rough region, which can effectively exploit more redundancy during data embedding compared with conventional methods of prediction error expansion (PEE). Additionally, the pixel selection mechanism is applied to reduce the number of shifted pixels, which leads to high visual quality of stego image. Experimental results show that, our scheme can achieve better rate-distortion performance than some of state-of-the-art schemes.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61171126, 61272452, 61702332, U1636101, 61562007), Ministry of Transport and Applied Basic Research Projects (2014329810060), and Science & Technology Program of Shanghai Maritime University (20130479), Natural Science Foundation of Guangxi (2017GXNSFAA198222), and Research Fund of Guangxi Key Lab of Multi-source Information Mining & Security (MIMS15-03).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Fang Cao & Bowen An

  2. School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, China

    Heng Yao

  3. Guangxi Key Lab of Multi-Source Information Mining & Security, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, 541004, China

    Zhenjun Tang

Authors
  1. Fang Cao
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  2. Bowen An
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  3. Heng Yao
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  4. Zhenjun Tang
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Correspondence to Fang Cao or Bowen An.

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Cao, F., An, B., Yao, H. et al. Local complexity based adaptive embedding mechanism for reversible data hiding in digital images. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 7911–7926 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6031-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-018-6031-4

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