Prediction-based Reversible Data Hiding Using Empirical Histograms in Images

This paper presents a multilevel reversible data hiding method based on histogram shifting which can recover the original image losslessly after the hidden data has been extracted from the stego-image. The method of prediction is adopted in our proposed scheme and prediction errors are produced to explore the similarity of neighboring pixels. In this article, we propose two different predictors to generate the prediction errors, where the prediction is carried out using the center prediction method and the JPEG-LS median edge predictor (MED) to exploit the correlation among the neighboring pixels. Instead of the original image, these prediction errors are used to hide the secret information. Moreover, we also present an improved method to search for peak and zero pairs and also talk about the analogy of the same to improve the histogram shifting method for huge embedding capacity and high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). In the one-level hiding, our method keeps image qualities larger than 53 dB and the ratio of embedding capacity has 0.43 bpp (bit per pixel). Besides, the concept with multiple layer embedding procedure is applied for obtaining high capacity, and the performance is demonstrated in the experimental results. From our experimental results and analytical reasoning, it shows that the proposed scheme has higher PSNR and high data embedding capacity than that of other reversible data hiding methods presented in the literature.