Capacity-approaching codes for reversible data hiding

Abstract

By reversible data hiding, the original cover can be losslessly restored after the embedded information is extracted. Kalker and Willems established a rate-distortion model for reversible data hiding, in which they proved the capacity bound and proposed a recursive code construction. In this paper we improve the recursive construction by designing a data embedding method for all-zero covers and a more efficient compression algorithm. We prove that the proposed codes can approach the capacity bound under various distortion constraints. We also apply this coding method to RS method for spatial images, and the experimental results show that the novel codes can significantly reduce the embedding distortion. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.