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Recently, contrast enhancement with reversible data hiding (CE-RDH) has been proposed for digital images to hide useful data into contrast-enhanced images. In existing schemes, one-dimensional (1D) or two-dimensional (2D) histogram is equalized during the process of CE-RDH so that an original image can be exactly recovered from its contrast-enhanced version. However, noticeable brightness change and color distortion may be introduced by applying these schemes, especially in the case of over enhancement. To preserve image quality, this paper presents a new 2D histogram based CE-RDH scheme by taking brightness preservation (BP) into account. In particular, the row or column of histogram bins with the maximum total height are chosen to be expanded at each time of histogram modification, while the row or column of bins to be expanded next are adaptively chosen according to the change of image brightness. Experimental results on three color image sets demonstrate efficacy and reversibility of the proposed scheme. Compared with the schemes using 1D histogram, image brightness can be preserved more finely by modifying the generated 2D histogram. Moreover, our proposed scheme preserves image color and brightness while achieving better image quality than the existing schemes.
Wu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.