Reversible Data Hiding Using Contrast Enhancement Approach

Reverse Data Hiding is a technique used to hide the object's data details. This technique is used to ensure the security and to protect the integrity of the object from any modification by preventing intended and unintended changes. Digital watermarking is a key ingredient to multimedia protection. However, most existing techniques distort the original content as a side effect of image protection. As a way to overcome such distortion, reversible data embedding has recently been introduced and is growing rapidly. In reversible data embedding, the original content can be completely restored after the removal of the watermark. Therefore, it is very practical to protect legal, medical, or other important imagery. In this paper a novel removable (lossless) data hiding technique is proposed. This technique is based on the histogram modification to produce extra space for embedding, and the redundancy in digital images is exploited to achieve a very high embedding capacity. This method has been applied to various standard images. The experimental results have demonstrated a promising outcome and the proposed technique achieved satisfactory and stable performance both on embedding capacity and visual quality. The proposed method capacity is up to 129K bits with PSNR between 42-45dB. The performance is hence better than most exiting reversible data hiding algorithms.