A Reversible Data Hiding Algorithm Based on Prediction Error with Large Amounts of Data Hiding in Spatial Domain

Abstract

In recent years among data hiding technologies, Reversible Data Hiding(RDH) technology has attracted widespread interest and application, which is to hide the secret information in a carrier image and recover the original carrier image losslessly to extract the secret information. Current research on RDH algorithms mainly involving frequency domain, spatial domain, and encryption domain. Based on the Prediction-Error Expansion(PEE) methods, as spatial domain approaches, achieved great progress in the past decade. However, there is a defect in the state-of-the-art methods that with the embedded payload increased, the distortion rate of the cover image increased simultaneously. To solve the problem, we proposed a refined reversible data hiding algorithm based on the PEE method with simple implementation. We improved an effective predictor that all the remaining pixels can be predicted in the embedding process, except for those in the first row, the first column, the last row, and the last column in the original image. The extraction process is the reverse of the embedding process that the embedded information and the original carrier is restored without damage. Our work utilized the correlation between image pixels better to solve the inherent contradiction between payload and distortion rate in the state-of-the-art data hiding algorithms. Proven through experiments, our method achieved a large embedding capacity while keeping the image distortion rate and computing complexity low.