Reversible Data Hiding with Improved Histogram Alteration Method

Digital watermarking has been a practical and interesting research topic in the last decade. Recently, a newly developed branch called reversible data hiding has emerged. It has attracted more and more attention in both researches and applications. With the definition of reversible data hiding, secret message can be hidden by schemes offered by algorithm designers. On the other hand, at the data extraction stage, both the original content and the hidden message should be perfectly extracted, and hence, how to design such schemes has become an interesting task. In this paper, we consider the easily implemented algorithm, called histogram-based scheme in reversible data hiding, and we modify the difference between adjacent pixels for making data hiding possible. The more amount of capacity for data embedding can be expected in comparison with conventional histogram-based reversible data hiding algorithm. Besides, the output image quality lies within the acceptable range. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages and improvements of the proposed method.