Generalized Reversible Data Hiding with Content-Adaptive Operation and Fast Histogram Shifting Optimization

Reversible data hiding (RDH) has become a hot spot in recent years as it allows both the secret data and the raw host to be perfectly reconstructed, which is quite desirable in sensitive applications requiring no degradation of the host. A lot of RDH algorithms have been designed by a sophisticated empirical way. It is not easy to extend them to a general case, which, to a certain extent, may have limited their wide-range applicability. Therefore, it motivates us to revisit the conventional RDH algorithms and present a general framework of RDH in this paper. The proposed framework divides the system design of RDH at the data hider side into four important parts, i.e., binary-map generation, content prediction, content selection, and data embedding, so that the data hider can easily design and implement, as well as improve, an RDH system. For each part, we introduce content-adaptive techniques that can benefit the subsequent data-embedding procedure. We also analyze the relationships between these four parts and present different perspectives. In addition, we introduce a fast histogram shifting optimization (FastHiSO) algorithm for data embedding to keep the payload-distortion performance sufficient while reducing the computational complexity. Two RDH algorithms are presented to show the efficiency and applicability of the proposed framework. It is expected that the proposed framework can benefit the design of an RDH system, and the introduced techniques can be incorporated into the design of advanced RDH algorithms.

Survey on Reversible Watermarking Techniques of Echocardiography

In critical domains such as medical and military, reversible watermarking (RW) has been used. In the medical domain, different modalities are used to store patient information. The current study focuses on the application of RW in echocardiography data. Mostly, RW is applied to protect patient data without affecting the quality of the decoded image. The RW methods are benchmarked as per imperceptibility, robustness, and payload. The survey presents a comparison of state-of-the-art RW techniques. The imperceptibility and payload are balanced through a tradeoff. It has been observed in the literature that most of the RW methods lack robustness, and very small-scale robustness has been achieved in this domain of watermarking. Different types of RW, i.e., fragile, semifragile, and robust methods, are being compared and reviewed. Mostly, fragile methods are developed on the error-expansion techniques built on histogram shifting-based approach. In this study, several RW methods are compared and the results are presented.

An authentication alternative using histogram shifting steganography method

This study aims to develop an authentication alternative by applying the Histogram shifting steganography method. The media used for authentication is image media. Histogram shifting utilizes the histogram of an image to insert a secret message. The developed authentication has implemented the Histogram shifting to insert user credentials into the carrier image. Users can use the steganographic image to log into their accounts. The method extracts the credentials from the image during the login. PSNR test of the steganographic images produces an average value of 52.52 dB. The extraction capability test shows that the method can extract all test images correctly. In addition, this authentication method is also more resistant to attacks common to password authentication.

Reversible Data Hiding based on Two-dimensional Histogram Shifting

This paper presents a two-dimensional histogram shifting technique for reversible data hiding algorithm. In order to avoid the distortion drift caused by hiding data into stereo H.264 video, we choose arbitrary embeddable blocks from 4×4 quantized discrete cosine transform luminance blocks which will not affect their adjacent blocks. Two coefficients in each embeddable block are chosen as a hiding coefficient pair. The selected coefficient pairs are classified into different sets on the basis of their values. Data could be hidden according to the set which the value of the coefficient pair belongs to. When the value of one coefficient may be changed by adding or subtracting 1, two data bits could be hidden by using the proposed method, whereas only one data bit could be embedded by employing the conventional histogram shifting. Experiments show that this two-dimensional histogram shifting method can be used to improve the hiding performance.