High-Capacity Reversible Watermarking through Predicted Error Expansion and Error Estimation Compensation

Abstract

Reversible watermarking which can preserve the original quality of the digital contents and protect the copyright has been studied actively. Especially, in medical, military, and art fields, the need for reversible watermarking is increasing. This paper proposes a high-capacity reversible watermarking through predicted error expansion and error estimation compensation. Watermark is embedded by expanding the difference histogram between the original value and the predicted value. Differently from previous methods calculating the difference between adjacent pixels, the presented method calculates the difference between the original value and the predicted value, and that increases the number of the histogram value, where the watermark is embedded. As a result, the high capacity is achieved. The inserted watermark is extracted by restoring the histogram between the original value and the predicted value. To prove the performance, the presented algorithm is compared with other previous methods on various test images. The result supports that the presented algorithm has a perfect reversibility, a high image quality, and a high capacity.