A Clustering‐Based Color Reordering Method for Reversible Data Hiding in Palette Images

ABSTRACT A recent research work pointed out that the reversible data hiding algorithms proposed for gray‐scale images can be implemented on the reconstructed palette images to improve embedding capacity and visual quality by reordering the color table. However, the reordering effect has a significant impact on performance improvement. Therefore, we propose a clustering‐based color reordering method for reversible data hiding in palette images to improve the reordering effect and further enhance the performance. In this method, we first design a centroid initialization method to select the initial centroids and then exploit the K‐means algorithm to generate clusters for the colors in the original color table. In the following, our proposed method, respectively, reorders the colors of these clusters by a greedy strategy and concatenates them into the reordered color table. Based on the relationship between the original and the reordered color tables, a novel index matrix can be reconstructed. Finally, state‐of‐the‐art reversible data hiding algorithms can be implemented on the reconstructed index matrix for performance improvement. Since our proposed method improves the reordering effect, enhances the correlation of the reconstructed index matrix, and reduces the length of the encoded location map, the maximal embedding capacities and the visual quality under the fixed embedding capacities are improved. We conducted experiments on two image datasets and six standard images to verify that the performance improvement of our proposed reordering method is better than that of the state‐of‐the‐art methods.