Distortion reduction for histogram modification-based reversible data hiding

The histogram modification (HM) method proposed by Ni et al. is very efficient for reversible data hiding (RDH). Besides the excellent execution-time performance, Ni et al.'s HM-based RDH (HMRDH) method has a high PSNR lower bound of marked images. In this short communication, an observation on Ni et al.'s HM-based RDH (HMRDH) method is pointed out that the distortion of the marked image from Ni et al.'s method is dependent on the number of 1's in the watermark. From this observation, we first present a watermark complement scheme to reduce the distortion occurred in Ni et al.'s HMRDH method. Later, combinatorial analysis for average distortion ratio of the proposed scheme is provided. This analysis motivates us to present a block-based complement scheme to improve the distortion reduction further. The tradeoff between the distortion and the number of partitioned blocks is also investigated. Taking nine well-known trademarks as the test watermarks and two cover images with different types of content, experimental results demonstrated the distortion reduction and higher PSNR lower bound advantages of the proposed block-based watermark complement scheme. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.