A Comprehensive Study of Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) Schemes Based on Pixel Value Ordering (PVO)

摘要

Reversible data hiding (RDH) plays a significant role in the field of information security which allows safe transmission of secret data inside a cover media. Additionally, RDH allows extraction of secret data and lossless recovery of the cover media at the decoding end which makes it applicable for the applications like medical imaging and military services. In recent years, variety of RDH techniques such as lossless compression, histogram shifting, difference expansion, prediction error expansion and pixel value ordering (PVO) have been proposed. Among all of them, PVO is one of the most researched RDH techniques as it provides high-fidelity images with decent data hiding capacity. So, to thoroughly understand the evolution of PVO based RDH schemes along with their advantages and disadvantages, this paper presents a comprehensive study of all the existing PVO based RDH schemes with an aim to provide research guidance to the researchers who are interested to work in the field of PVO based reversible data hiding. For this, the working of PVO based schemes is discussed and explained by using suitable examples. Additionally, the challenges being faced by reversible data hiding technique for increasing the data hiding capacity along with image quality, are comprehensively presented. Furthermore, comparative analysis of different PVO-based RDH scheme (after categorizing them based on their working style) using two key parameters-embedding capacity and marked image quality, is presented.