Reversible data hiding based on multilevel histogram modification and sequential recovery

This paper proposes a reversible data hiding method for natural images. Due to the similarity of neighbor pixels' values, most differences between pairs of adjacent pixels are equal or close to zero. In this work, a histogram is constructed based on these difference statistics. In the data embedding stage, a multilevel histogram modification mechanism is employed. As more peak points are used for secret bits modulation, the hiding capacity is enhanced compared with those conventional methods based on one or two level histogram modification. Moreover, as the differences concentricity around zero is improved, the distortions on the host image introduced by secret content embedding is mitigated. In the data extraction and image recovery stage, the embedding level instead of the peak points and zero points is used. Accordingly the affiliated information is much smaller than in those methods of the kind. A sequential recovery strategy is exploited for each pixel is reconstructed with the aid of its previously recovered neighbor. Experimental results and comparisons with other methods demonstrate our method's effectiveness and superior performance. (C) 2011 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.