Color image reversible data hiding with double-layer embedding

Abstract

Reversible data hiding (RDH) in color image is an important topic of data hiding. This paper presents an efficient RDH algorithm for color image via double-layer embedding. The key contribution is the proposed double-layer embedding technique based on histogram shifting (HS). This technique exploits image interpolation to generate prediction error matrices for HS in the first-layer embedding and uses local pixel similarity to calculate difference matrices for HS in the second-layer embedding. It inherits reversibility from HS and makes high embedding capacity due to the use of double layers in data embedding. In addition, inter-channel correlation is incorporated into the first-layer embedding and the second-layer embedding for generating histograms with high peaks, so as to improve embedding capacity. Experiments with open standard datasets are done to validate performance of the proposed RDH algorithm. Comparison results show that the proposed RDH algorithm outperforms some state-of-the-art RDH algorithms in terms of embedding capacity and visual quality.