An Improved Histogram Bin Shifting Based Reversible Data Hiding of Color Images

摘要

Reversible data hiding technique recovers the original image bit by bit after extracting the watermark bits from the watermarked image. In this paper, a novel reversible data hiding technique is proposed for color images. The proposed technique is based on histogram bin shifting technique, which is an efficient and widely used method for embedding the watermark in gray scale images in reversible manner. The proposed scheme extends the concept of histogram modification on RGB color images. However, as compared to basic histogram modification technique (used for reversible data hiding) which utilizes zero point and peak point, proposed scheme utilizes first peak point and second peak point so that the distortion generated due to the pixels shifting can be minimized. The successful application of proposed scheme on several standard color test images and experimental results in terms of higher PSNR values demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.