A novel reversible data hiding based on adaptive block‐partition and payload‐allocation method

Abstract A reversible data hiding method based on partition is researched because it can effectively reduce shifting distortion in given embedding capacity. However, traditional partition is to divide an image into equal‐sized blocks, which cannot be divided reasonably according to the content of the image. In order to achieve dynamic partition and effectively utilize the complexity of the image, this paper proposes a novel reversible data hiding based on adaptive block‐partition and payload‐allocation method. In this technique, instead of equal partition, adaptive block‐partition is proposed to establish multiple histograms by dividing the cover image into several image blocks of different sizes dynamically, and the image blocks of different sizes are processed successively through multiple sorting and implement adaptive payload allocation according to complexity, then the data is embedded into two sides of prediction‐error histograms to effectively reduce the shifting distortion. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the state‐of‐the‐art traditional fixed‐sized blocking‐based reversible data hiding methods