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Improving visual quality of reversible data hiding by twice sorting

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Abstract

In most literatures on reversible data hiding (RDH), the visual quality of marked images is only assessed by PSNR, and the smoothness-priority-based sorting technique is efficient for improving PSNR. However, modifications in smooth areas are conflict with other criterion of visual quality such as Just Noticeable Difference (JND). To reconcile this contradiction, we propose a twice sorting scheme, in which the pixels are first sorted and divided into several levels with a smoothness criterion, and then sorted twice with JND in each level. According to the sorted order, message bits are embedded into the predicted errors of pixels based on rhombus prediction. Experimental results show that this novel method significantly outperforms previous JND-related RDH schemes on not only PSNR but also SSIM and JND distortion.

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Acknowledgments

The authors sincerely thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and insightful suggestions to improve the paper quality.

This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61170234, by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant XDA06030600, by the Funding of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory under Grant KJ-13-02, by the Doctoral Scientific Research Foundation of Anhui University under Grant J01001319, and by the Backbone Teacher Training Program of Anhui University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230027, China

    Yang Yang, Weiming Zhang, Xiaocheng Hu & Nenghai Yu

  2. School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China

    Yang Yang

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  1. Yang Yang
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  2. Weiming Zhang
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  3. Xiaocheng Hu
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  4. Nenghai Yu
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Correspondence to Weiming Zhang.

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Yang, Y., Zhang, W., Hu, X. et al. Improving visual quality of reversible data hiding by twice sorting. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 13663–13678 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2824-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2824-x

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