A Multistage High Capacity Reversible Data Hiding Technique Without Overhead Communication

Reversible Data Hiding(RDH) has been extensively investigated, recently, due to its numerous applications in the field of defence, medical, law enforcement and image authentication. However, most of RDH techniques suffer from low secret data hiding capacity and communication overhead. For this, multistage high-capacity reversible data hiding technique without overhead is proposed in this manuscript. Proposed reversible data hiding approach exploits histogram peaks for embedding the secret data along with overhead bits both in plain and encrypted domain. First, marked image is obtained by embedding secret data in the plain domain which is further processed using affine cipher maintaining correlation among the pixels. In second stage, overhead bits are embedded in the encrypted marked image. High embedding capacity is achieved through exploiting histogram peak for embedding multiple bits of secret data. Proposed approach is experimentally validated on different datasets and results are compared with the state-of-the-art techniques over different images.