Synergy between singular value differencing in multi-directional block-pairs and pre-extracted residuals: Wide-domain robust reversible hiding

Robust Reversible Data Hiding (RRDH) predominantly focuses on compression, with insufficient attention to geometric attacks. Existing geometric attack-oriented schemes are confined to 1-bit watermark capacity, failing to meet practical demands. To address this, this paper proposes a novel wide-domain RRDH scheme based on synergy between singular value differencing in multi-directional block-pairs and pre-extracted residuals. First, a mechanism constructs adjacent block-pairs across multiple directions and performs singular value differencing. It extracts maximum singular values via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and embeds 4-bit watermarks via differential modulation, and resists ±30° rotation, 0.8×–1.5× scaling, and 2-pixel translation. Second, a texture-adaptive modulation strategy dynamically adjusts singular value modification amplitude with image gradient magnitude, maintaining robustness while reducing host image distortion. After embedding, the average host image PSNR remains ≥35 dB. Third, a residual-watermark synergistic embedding framework pre-extracts residual matrices, compresses them, and adaptively embeds them via least significant bit (LSB) modification within reasonable capacity limits, achieving complete lossless recovery of the host image in attack-free scenarios. Experiments verify excellent watermark extraction accuracy under these geometric attacks and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression (quality factor ≥80), effectively resolving key limitations in existing schemes, including multi-directional geometric attack adaptation, robustness-quality balance, and embedding-extraction compatibility.