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A novel two-level embedding pattern for grayscale-invariant reversible data hiding

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Abstract

Although traditional reversible data hiding (RDH) methods work well at protecting the secret data and guaranteeing the high visual quality of the cover image as well, the performance of down steaming visual tasks, such as feature extraction and point alignment, is degraded. To address this issue, Hou et al. [13] proposed to embed secret data into color images while keeping the corresponding grayscale invariant. However, we find that the embedding efficiency of this method is still unsatisfactory. And the embedding distortion should be further reduced. In this paper, unit embedding distortion is designed to help evaluate the embedding efficiency of per pixel unit. Then, an adaptive embedding pattern is introduced by adaptively embedding one or two bits of secret data into different positions according to the context information. While our approach provides a novel two-level predictor, benefiting from two normal predictors to reduce the embedding distortion. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to the previous method, our scheme could significantly enhance the image fidelity while keeping the grayscale invariant.

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Data availability

The datasets that support the findings of this study are openly available in Miscellaneous volume of USC-SIPI at http://sipi.usc.edu/database and in Kodak Lossless True Color Image Suite at http://www.r0k.us/graphics/kodak/. The program that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding author, upon request.

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Funding

This work is supported in part by the National Key Laboratory Foundation of Satellite Information Hiding in Encryption Domain (Grant No. 6142411432107), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1903213), the Open Foundation of Henan Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Situation Awareness (Grant No. HNTS2022015) and the Key Science and Technology Program of Shaanxi Province (Grant No. 2020GY-005).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Xiaoran Zhang, Zhibin Pan, Erdun Gao, Xinyi Gao & Guojun Fan

  2. Zhengzhou Xinda Institute of Advanced Technology, Zhengzhou, 450002, China

    Zhibin Pan

  3. National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Space Microwave, Xi’an Institute of Space Radio Technology, Xi’an, 710100, China

    Quan Zhou

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  1. Xiaoran Zhang
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  2. Zhibin Pan
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  3. Quan Zhou
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  4. Erdun Gao
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  5. Xinyi Gao
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  6. Guojun Fan
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Correspondence to Zhibin Pan.

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We declare that we have no financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that can inappropriately influence our work, and there is no professional or other personal interest of any nature or kind in any product, service and/or company that could be construed as influencing the position presented in, or the review of, the manuscript entitled “A Novel Two-level Embedding Pattern for Grayscale-Invariant Reversible Data Hiding”.

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Zhang, X., Pan, Z., Zhou, Q. et al. A novel two-level embedding pattern for grayscale-invariant reversible data hiding. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 33911–33935 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14789-0

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