Reversible Data Hiding Based on Adaptive Block Selection Strategy

Recently, a reversible data hiding (RDH) method was proposed based on local histogram shifting. This method selects the peak bin of the local histogram as a reference and expands the two neighboring bins of the peak bin to carry the message bits. Since the peak bin keeps unchanged during the embedding process, the neighboring bins can be easily identified at the receiver end, and the original image can be restored completely while extracting the embedded data. In this article, as an extension of the algorithm, the authors propose an RDH scheme based on adaptive block selection strategy. Via a new block selection strategy, those blocks of the carrier image may carry more message bits whereas introducing less distortion will take precedence over data hiding. Experimental results demonstrate that higher visual quality can be obtained compared with the original method, especially when the embedding rate is low.