Efficient Reversible Data Hiding Based on Multiple Histograms Modification

Prediction-error expansion (PEE) is the most successful reversible data hiding (RDH) technique, and existing PEE-based RDH methods are mainly based on the modification of one- or two-dimensional prediction-error histogram (PEH). The two-dimensional PEH-based methods perform generally better than those based on one-dimensional PEH; however, their performance is still unsatisfactory since the PEH modification manner is fixed and independent of image content. In this paper, we propose a new RDH method based on PEE for multiple histograms. Unlike the previous methods, we consider in this paper a sequence of histograms and devise a new embedding mechanism based on multiple histograms modification (MHM). A complexity measurement is computed for each pixel according to its context, and the pixels with a given complexity are collected together to generate a PEH. By varying the complexity to cover the whole image, a sequence of histograms can be generated. Then, two expansion bins are selected in each generated histogram and data embedding is realized based on MHM. Here, the expansion bins are adaptively selected considering the image content such that the embedding distortion is minimized. With such selected expansion bins, the proposed MHM-based RDH method works well. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional PEE and its miscellaneous extensions including both one- or two-dimensional PEH-based ones.