An Improved Reversible Data Hiding Algorithm for Image Contrast Enhancement

Recently, reversible data hiding (RDH) has been employed to perform automatic image enhancement in a reversible manner. This is useful for cloud service providers who offer the users image storage services. In this paper, we propose an efficient extension to a recent RDH that employed the popular unsharp-masking for image contrast enhancement. The extension is centered around adjusting the Laplacian values that are used for contrast enhancement in a way that addresses the problems in the original algorithm in terms of noise amplification, over enhancement artifacts and broken edges. Experimental results proved the ability of proposed algorithm in maintaining high embedding capacity, improving the image contrast, and alleviating the problems encountered in the original algorithm.