An adaptive prediction-error expansion oriented reversible information hiding scheme

  • Authors:

  • Chuan Qin;Chin-Chen Chang;Li-Ting Liao

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai 200093, China and Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Fen ...;Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan and Department of Biomedical Imaging and Radiological Science, China Medical University, Ta ...;Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Pattern Recognition Letters
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Data hiding in digital images can be used in secure communication, copyright protection, and etc. For some important images, such as medical and military images, the original images must be recovered after extracting the embedded data, because distortions are unacceptable for these kinds of images. In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding method based on prediction-error expansion. Each pixel of the cover image, excluding the first row and the first column, is predicted by its top and left neighboring pixels in the raster-scanning order. The relationship between the prediction error and the pre-determined threshold decides whether the current pixel is embeddable or not. Since the proposed prediction process provides small prediction error, our method can achieve high embedding rate and good visual quality of the stego image by the expansion of prediction error. During the procedure of extraction and recovery, the same prediction process is conducted, and then the embedded secret data and the cover image can be recovered correctly. The histogram squeezing technique is utilized to prevent underflow and overflow problems. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides better performance than some other methods.