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Reversible data hiding with high visual quality using pairwise PVO and PEE

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Abstract

Pixel-value ordering (PVO) and prediction-error expansion (PEE) are the two most popular strategies of reversible data hiding (RDH) as PVO provides high-fidelity stego-images with decent embedding capacity (EC) and PEE provides high EC with limited distortion. Further, pairwise embedding scheme introduced by Ou et al. again boosts the EC and reduces distortion of both the strategies. However, there has been a dearth of RDH schemes which can optimally utilize both the pairwise PVO and pairwise PEE strategies to provide a least trade-off between EC and visual quality. In this paper, we propound an adaptive RDH (ARDH) scheme which optimally selects the embedding strategy based on image block category. The proposed scheme reads the image in the block-wise manner using a sliding window of 4 × 4 size to get the image block of same size, then divides the block into inner and outer sub-block. The outer sub-block is considered as a reference block for the inner sub-block to determine statistical properties of the inner sub-block using standard deviation. An enhanced pairwise PEE is adopted for embedding when the standard deviation of outer sub-block’s pixels is smaller than a first user-defined threshold. In case the standard deviation is greater than the first threshold but lower than a second user-defined threshold, then pairwise PVO is adopted. Otherwise, the sub-block is skipped without embedding the secret data. As a result, the ARDH scheme utilizes both the PEE and PVO strategies in optimum manner, which in turn provides higher EC and image quality than the most of the existing RDH schemes as validated by experimental results.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2021R1I1A3049788) and Brain Pool program funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT through the National Research Foundation of Korea (2019H1D3A1A01101687, 2021H1D3A2A01099390).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, India

    Neeraj Kumar

  2. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Delhi Technological University, New Delhi, India

    Rajeev Kumar

  3. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, NIT Jalandhar, Jalandhar, India

    Aruna Malik & Samayveer Singh

  4. Department of Software Convergence, Andong National University, Andong (Gyeongbuk), Republic of Korea

    Ki-Hyun Jung

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  1. Neeraj Kumar
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  2. Rajeev Kumar
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Correspondence to Rajeev Kumar.

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Kumar, N., Kumar, R., Malik, A. et al. Reversible data hiding with high visual quality using pairwise PVO and PEE. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 30733–30758 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14867-3

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