Improved reversible data hiding based on histogram modification of difference images

In this paper, we propose a new reversible data hiding algorithm using the histogram modification of difference images. The histogram modification method has been used for reversible data hiding remarkably. However, this method has the underflow/overflow problems. To overcome these problems, we embed the compressed location map to identify the points of underflow and overflow. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can recover the original image quite simply without the overhead information. In addition, because we use the multilevel data hiding scheme, we can get a large amount of embedding data while keeping low distortion. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.