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Reversible data hiding of color image based on channel unity embedding

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Abstract

Most of the current reversible data hiding (RDH) methods are based on grayscale images; however, color images are widely used in real life. In this paper, we propose a color image RDH scheme based on channels united embedded, which utilizes pixel value ordering (PVO). First, the correlation between color image channels is utilized to re-collect the pixels in the current channel block and the pixels are guided by the reference channel. Large pixel values are preferentially collected to increase the number of expanded prediction errors. The traditional color image RDH capacity allocation method needs to allocate capacity to the three R, G, and B channels beforehand, and the three channels are independent for data embedding. This paper proposes a channel unity embedding (CUE) method to uniformly sort the pixel blocks of the three channels according to the complexity value, and perform data embedding on the blocks according to the order of the complexity values. In CUE, after data embedding is completed, capacity allocation can be achieved and smooth blocks in the channels can be fully utilized, thereby reducing invalid shifts. Finally, the recollection and CUE strategies are combined with pairwise prediction Error expansion (PEE) to further improve the performance. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves significant superiority in fidelity over a series of state-of-the-art schemes. For example, the PSNR on the Lena image reaches 63.08 dB, which is a 0.81 dB gain compared to the best results in the literature with a 20,000 bits embedding capacity.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this manuscript are openly available in USC-SIPI image database (http://sipi.usc.edu/database/) and Kodak PhotoCD database (http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant U1936113 and 61872303.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 611756, China

    Ningxiong Mao, Hongjie He & Keke Zhu

  2. School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 611756, China

    Fan Chen

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  1. Ningxiong Mao
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  2. Hongjie He
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  3. Fan Chen
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  4. Keke Zhu
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Contributions

Ningxiong Mao: Software, Validation, Writing - Original Draft, Visualization, heck writing gram mar, Formal analysis. Hongjie He: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - Review & Editing, Project administration, Funding acqui sition. Fan Chen: Funding acquisition, Resources. Keke Zhu: In vestigation, Data Curation.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hongjie He.

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Mao, N., He, H., Chen, F. et al. Reversible data hiding of color image based on channel unity embedding. Appl Intell 53, 21347–21361 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-023-04707-0

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