Reversible Data Hiding Based on Multichannel Difference Value Ordering for Color Images

Considering the correlation existing among different color channels of the image, we propose a novel reversible data hiding (RDH) scheme based on multichannel difference value ordering. By applying the technique of pixel value ordering (PVO), we establish a certain relationship by sorting the differences among adjacent pixels of different color channels. Combined with the optimized pairwise prediction-error expansion by analyzing the distribution of pixel difference, our scheme can adaptively select pixel channel to achieve reversible embedding of information. Through simulation experiments, the feasibility of this RDH scheme in image distortion and computational complexity is verified. When the threshold T is set to 3, the average PSNR of the test images embedded with 5000 bits of additional information in each color channel can reach 63.41, 64.38, and 63.96, respectively. When the embedding capacity is 20000 bits, the PSNR of the color image can reach 58.90 dB. Considering the embedding capacity and image distortion comprehensively from the simulation data, our proposed scheme has a better performance than the previous PVO-RDH schemes which only consider a single channel.