Reversible Image Data Hiding based on improved Block Histogram Shifting

With the rapid development of network communication, image data hiding technology has occupied an important position in the field of information security. As a branch of image data hiding, reversible image data hiding can recover the original carrier after extracting the embedded information. Reversible image data hiding has potential applications in medical images, military images, legal scanned documents, and other fields. There is a strong demand in many applications to maintain a high PSNR value for stego images while providing high embedding capacity. But this work often has great challenges. In this paper, we propose a new reversible image data hiding algorithm by improving typical block histogram shifting. The pixels corresponding to the peak and sub-peak in the block histogram are selected as the host for information embedding. The proposed technique can improve the embedding capacity and limit image distortion through careful block processing. The intensive experiments using images of different sizes as host media are conducted. The experimental results show that stego images can achieve an average PSNR of over 45dB with a high embedding capacity.