Reversible Image Data Hiding with Local Adaptive Contrast Enhancement

Recently, a novel reversible data hiding scheme is proposed for contrast enhancement by Wu (IEEE Signal Process Lett 22.1:81–85, 2015). Instead of pursuing the traditional high PSNR value, he designs the message embedding algorithm to enhance the contrast of the host image. In this paper, an extended scheme is proposed to not only adaptively enhance the contrast of the image, but also to keep the PSNR value high meanwhile. Firstly, the original host image is divided into non-overlapping blocks, such that the local contrast of the image can be enhanced adaptively. Secondly, we classify the pixels of each block into two sets, the “referenced” set and the “embedded” set, and then processing them alternatively such that additional side information is eliminated. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm achieves increased local visual quality and performs better than Wu et al.’s scheme with keeping image’s PSNR high as criterion for RDH.