Multi-level Reversible Data Hiding with Pyramidal Structure

Reversible data hiding has its attractions and possible drawbacks in researches, and it has the potential to extend to digital rights management (DRM) applications. For reversible data hiding, secret information can be hidden into original multimedia content, and the content with hidden data can be transmitted to the receiver. After reception, receiver employs corresponding algorithm to decode the content with secret information, and then both the original content and the secret information can perfectly be recovered. The major challenge is to maintain the reversibility of the algorithm, while keeping as more amount of embedding secret as possible with acceptable quality of output content. By taking the inherent characteristics of original content into consideration, in addition to the spatial relationships by use of pyramidal structure, the more amounts of secret can be hidden, with similar quality in output image. Simulation results have demonstrated the better performances with our algorithm over existing ones. And it has the potential to extend to practical applications with our reversible data hiding algorithm.