Adaptive Difference Expansion-Based Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for Digital Images

In this research paper, an adaptive difference expansion-based reversible data hiding technique with the capability of embedding either three bits or two bits or one bit for each pixel and which can deal with color image is presented. To embed and extract data, the proposed technique has some salient features such as its capability to control the embedding capacity by using three global embedding parameters. These parameters are computed using the statistics of the embedded pixel surrounding pixels. Also, the data embedding steps in the proposed scheme can be reversed to completely retrieve the cover image free from any deformation. Furthermore, in the proposed technique, no reference images or memorization of the embedded pixel positions are needed in the data extraction process. A course of experiments is conducted, and the results demonstrated that the proposed technique outperforms other similar techniques in terms of payload capacity and PSNR.