In recent years, reversible data hiding technology has been widely used in JPEG images for special purposes such as file management and image authentication. Histogram shifting is one of the most popular techniques for achieving reversible data hiding technology. However, invalid shifting in histogram shifting limits the performance of existing reversible data hiding schemes. Therefore, we propose a two-dimensional histogram shifting-based reversible data hiding scheme in this article to improve the performance of marked JPEG images in terms of visual quality and file size. In the proposed histogram shifting method, only the coefficient pairs containing two non-zero quantized discrete cosine transform coefficients are changed for embedding data. Specifically, the coefficient pairs with at least one quantized discrete cosine transform coefficient valued −1 or +1 are shifted and the rests leave room for embedding data. With our proposed reversible data hiding scheme, the number of invalid shifting pixels is reduced so that it improves the performance of marked JPEG images. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio and has a lower increase in file size than state-of-art methods.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.