PVO-Based Reversible Data Hiding Exploiting Two-Layer Embedding for Enhancing Image Fidelity

• Published in: Symmetry (Basel) Vol. 12; no. 7; p. 1164
• Main Authors: Lee, Chin-Feng, Shen, Jau-Ji, Wu, Yi-Jhen, Agrawal, Somya
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.07.2020
• Subjects: Advantages; Embedding; Image enhancement; image fidelity; Image quality; Methods; pixel value ordering (PVO); Pixels; prediction error expansion (PEE); Quality; Reversible data hiding (RDH)
• ISSN: 2073-8994; 2073-8994
• DOI: 10.3390/sym12071164

Recently, Li et al. proposed a data hiding method based on pixel value ordering (PVO) and prediction error expansion (PEE). In their method, maximum and minimum values were predicted and the pixel values were modified to embed secret data. Thereafter, many scholars have proposed improvisations to the original PVO method. In this paper, a Reversible data hiding (RDH) method is proposed where the secret data is dispersed into two layers using different modes of operations. The second layer changes the dividing mode, and the first and the second layers do not take duplicate blocks. Under a fixed embedding capacity, threshold value and block size are controlled, complex blocks are filtered and the secret data is hidden in smooth blocks. This paper also compares the effectiveness of four well-known PVO series methods, the latest PVO methods, difference expansion (DE) method and reduced difference expansion (RDE) method. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces distortion in the image, thereby enhancing the visual symmetry/quality compared to previous state-of-the-art methods and increasing its high application value.