Reversible data hiding with dual pixel-value-ordering and minimum prediction error expansion.

Abstract

Pixel Value Ordering (PVO) holds an impressive property for high fidelity Reversible Data Hiding (RDH). In this paper, we introduce a dual PVO (dPVO) for Prediction Error Expansion (PEE), and thereby develop a new RDH scheme to offer a better rate-distortion performance. Particularly, we propose to embed in two phases: forward and backward. In the forward phase, PVO with classic PEE is applied to every non-overlapping image block of size 1 × 3. In the backward phase, minimum-set and maximum-set of pixels are determined from the pixels predicted in the forward phase. The minimum set only contains the lowest predicted pixels and the maximum set contains the largest predicted pixels of each image block. Proposed dPVO with PEE is then applied to both sets, so that the pixel values of minimum set are increased and that of the maximum set are decreased by a unit value. Thereby, the pixels predicted in the forward embedding can partially be restored to their original values resulting in both a better embedded image quality and a higher embedding rate. Experimental results have recorded a promising rate-distortion performance of our scheme with a significant improvement of embedded image quality at higher embedding rates compared to the popular and state-of-the-art PVO-based RDH schemes.