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Reversible data hiding based on pixel segmentation and prediction for improving hiding capacity

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Abstract

The idea of the traditional histogram shifting technique is to hide a message within the cover-image pixel distribution. However, the embedding capacity is limited by the peak point occurrences. To solve this problem, many reversible data hiding (RDH) techniques are developed to combine pixel prediction and histogram shifting to increase the embedding payload. In this paper, a RDH scheme based on chessboard prediction and pixel partitioning is proposed for enhancing the hiding payload. Pixel partitioning is used to separate a pixel into two parts: most significant bit and least significant bit. Then, the chessboard predictor is adopted to generate prediction errors and separate the pixels. Thereafter, histogram shifting is applied to embed the secret messages into prediction errors. Due to the high similarity of adjacent pixels in an image, the generated prediction errors are highly close to zero, resulting in a large embedding space. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method has superior performance in embedding capacity with acceptable image visual quality compared to existing schemes since it adopts the adaptive adjustment strategy to achieve this improved balance.

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Funding

This work was partially supported by the National Science and Technology Council of the Republic of China under the Grant No. MOST 110-2221-E-153-002-MY2, MOST111-2221-E-155-038, and MOST 111-2218-E-218-004-MBK-.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Bachelor Program in Informatics, Yuan Ze University, Taoyuan, 320315, Taiwan

    Cheng-Ta Huang

  2. Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, Taoyuan, 320315, Taiwan

    Cheng-Ta Huang

  3. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Chiayi University, Chiayi City, 600355, Taiwan

    Chi-Yao Weng

  4. Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, National Pingtung University, Pingtung, 900391, Taiwan

    Guo-Ting Zheng

  5. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Central University, Taoyuan City, 320317, Taiwan

    Hao-Yu Weng

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  1. Cheng-Ta Huang
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  2. Chi-Yao Weng
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Contributions

Cheng-Ta Huang contributed to Conceptualization, methodology; Chi-Yao Weng contributed to Supervision, Writing—review and editing, validation; Guo-Ting Zheng contributed to Data curation, coding; Hao-Yu Weng contributed to Writing—original draft preparation.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chi-Yao Weng.

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Huang, CT., Weng, CY., Zheng, GT. et al. Reversible data hiding based on pixel segmentation and prediction for improving hiding capacity. SIViP 18, 5043–5059 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-024-03214-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-024-03214-0

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