Reversible data hiding exploiting high‐correlation regulation for high‐quality images

Abstract

Reversible data hiding enables the cover image to be restored from the stego image without any loss after the secret message is extracted. In this paper, we proposed a novel reversible data‐hiding scheme for high image quality based on the histogram‐shifting method. In our scheme, we proposed two mechanisms for choosing reference pixels according to the high correlation of adjacent pixels. The differences between reference pixels and their corresponding, neighboring, non‐reference pixels are exploited to hide secret messages according to the difference shifting mechanism. To achieve larger embedding capacity, the reference pixels are designed to further carry secret messages based on the interpolation prediction method. Experimental results showed that our proposed scheme achieved higher embedding payload while maintaining better visual quality of the images than did other schemes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.