A Reversible Data Hiding Scheme using Center Pixel Difference

Abstract—This paper presents a reversible data hiding scheme. The proposed scheme is based on the pixel difference histogram shifting to spare space for data hiding. Pixel differences are generated between a center pixel and its neighbors in a pre-assigned block. A large number of pixel differences with equal values can be obtained which means more data can be embedded into the cover image than previous works based on histogram shifting. In addition, multi-layer embedding with various turns is used to increase the hiding capacity, and in each turn, we can offer high embedding capacity and keep low distortion by choosing the optimized block size and the best threshold. Experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can be implemented easily and no extra information except message length is needed to extract data and restore image. Index Terms—Reversible data hiding, Lossless data hiding