Adaptive reversible data hiding for JPEG images with multiple two-dimensional histograms

• Published in: Journal of visual communication and image representation Vol. 85; p. 103487
• Main Authors: Weng, Shaowei, Zhou, Ye, Zhang, Tiancong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.05.2022
• Subjects: Multiple histograms; Rate–distortion model; Reversible data hiding; Two-dimensional histogram; Reversible data hiding; Two-dimensional histogram; Multiple histograms; Rate–distortion model
• ISSN: 1047-3203; 1095-9076
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jvcir.2022.103487

Joint photographic experts group (JPEG) can provide good quality with small file size but also eliminate extensively the redundancies of images. Therefore, hiding data into JPEG images in terms of maintaining high visual quality at small file sizes has been a great challenge for researchers. In this paper, an adaptive reversible data hiding method for JPEG images containing multiple two-dimensional (2D) histograms is proposed. Adaptability is mainly reflected in three aspects. The first one is to preferentially select sharper histograms for data embedding after K histograms are established by constructing the kth (k∈{1,2,…,K}) histogram using the kth non-zero alternating current (AC) coefficient of all the quantized discrete cosine transform blocks. On the other hand, to fully exploit the strong correlation between coefficients of one histogram, the smoothness of each coefficient is estimated by a block smoothness estimator so that a sharply-distributed 2D-histogram is constructed by combining two coefficients with similar smoothness into a pair. The pair corresponding to low complexity is selected priorly for data embedding, leading to high embedding performance while maintaining low file size. Besides, we design multiple embedding strategies to adaptively select the embedding strategy for each 2D histogram. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve higher rate–distortion performance which maintaining lower file storage space, compared with previous studies. •Our aim is to design a JPEG RDH scheme with high performance and low time cost.•We design four strategies to adaptively select the optimal strategy for each 2DH.•We priorly select multiple sharp 2DHs for hiding data based on the rate–distortion model.•Notable results regarding high embedding performance and low computational cost.