Pairwise IPVO-based reversible data hiding

Shaowei Weng, Jeng-Shyang Pan, Jiehang Deng, Zhili Zhou

Abstract: Recently, Peng et al. proposed a reversible data hiding method based on improved pixel-value-ordering (PVO) and prediction-error expansion. In this paper, a novel method is proposed by extending Peng et al.’s work. In our method, three largest (or smallest) pixels in a block are utilized to generate two differences, and a new pixel modification strategy is proposed so that the PVO remains unchanged after data embedding. Taking three largest pixels for example, we utilize the third largest pixel to predict the second largest one, and meanwhile use the second largest one to predict the maximum. In this way, two differences are obtained. They are modified jointly so as to be embedded with log 23 bits instead of 2 bits in the traditional RDH methods. The advantage of doing so is to exclude situations where PVO is changed. Moreover, two embedding layers are utilized together to further decrease the embedding distortion. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed method outperforms Peng et al. ’s and some other state-of-the-art works.