A Novel Method for Enhanced Image Based Reversible Data Hiding

Reversible data hiding (RDH) technology has been widely used due to its function on copyright protection and content integrity authentication. However, most conventional RDH schemes focus on its performance, i.e., embedding capacity and distortion, instead of its security. It means those RDH schemes could be easily inspect by most steganalysis methods, i.e., SPAM [44], to show some suspicious secret data hidden in it. Thus, the practicability of RDH is limited. In this paper, we creatively choose enhanced image as carrier to develop a secure RDH framework. On one hand, it is found that the statistical property of enhanced image is suit for reversible data hiding and thus achieve desired performance. On the other hand, enhanced image as carrier could provide more embedding space for security improvement. Thus, some security improvement skills from steganography field, such as multi-feature sorting, local clustering and so on, are introduced into above framework. Experimental results show the superiority of proposed scheme in the aspect of high performance and security level compared with other related algorithms.