Reversible Data Hiding with Optimal Value Transfer – Perfect Data Recovery 🔄

In reversible data hiding techniques, the values of host data are modified according to some particular rules and the original host content can be perfectly restored after extraction of the hidden data on receiver side. In this paper, the optimal rule of value modification under a payload-distortion criterion is found by using an iterative procedure, and a practical reversible data hiding scheme is proposed. The secret data, as well as the auxiliary information used for content recovery, are carried by the differences between the original pixel-values and the corresponding values estimated from the neighbors. Here, the estimation errors are modified according to the optimal value transfer rule. Also, the host image is divided into a number of pixel subsets and the auxiliary information of a subset is always embedded into the estimation errors in the next subset. A receiver can successfully extract the embedded secret data and recover the original content in the subsets with an inverse order. This way, a good reversible data hiding performance is achieved.