Adjustable prediction-based reversible data hiding

Reversible data hiding has received considerable interest recently in the field of information hiding. However, most of difference expansion (DE-based) schemes suffer from the problem that image cannot be restored into its original one free from location map. Reversible data hiding scheme with location map cannot effectively raise hiding capacity: in addition, it also incurs the computational cost during embedding and extracting. This study presents a reversible data hiding scheme that is free of location map and thus the computational cost, associated with embedding and extracting, is lower than that of most DE-based schemes. Furthermore, our scheme solves the problem of the low embedding rate of Tseng and Hsieh's scheme because our scheme takes advantage of the bulk of relatively high small prediction-errors to raise embedding capacity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves the larger payload and the better image quality than some existing schemes by an adjustable control factor. The performance of the proposed scheme is more stable for the different images. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.