Multiple histograms based reversible data hiding by using FCM clustering

Reversible data hiding algorithm (RDH) has been widely used in multimedia's copyright protection and content integrity authentication. As a typical RDH scheme, histogram shifting (HS) is extensively investigated due to its high quality of stego-image. Most existing HS based RDH schemes utilize prediction and sorting techniques to build single sharp histogram, which exploit the smooth areas in cover image for data hiding. To take advantages of the correlation among image contents of different texture characteristics, several multiple histograms based RDHs (MH_RDH) are proposed recently, which resort on some rigid rules, e.g. single feature based sorting followed by uniform segmentation of sorted sequence, to construct the multiple histograms. In this paper, the clustering algorithm, i.e. Fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering, is introduced for the construction of multiple histograms. The FCM equipped with deliberately designed features is employed to classify the cover carriers, e.g. prediction errors, into different clusters with similar traits, which are then used to build the multiple histograms for efficient data embedding. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme over other state-of-the-art ones. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.