Adaptive Reversible Data Hiding With Contrast Enhancement Based on Multi-Histogram Modification

Reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement (RDH-CE) is proposed to aim at improving the contrast of images while embedding data. After deeply analyzing and studying the RDH-CE method proposed by Jafar et al. , it is found that there are three main problems in their method. Firstly, their method ignores the fact that the left-bottom neighbors of a pixel contribute to increasing the accuracy of the local-complexity evaluation. Secondly, Jafar et al. ’s method employs K-means clustering in combination with one single feature to split pixels into five classes, leading to a weak clustering performance. Finally, Jafar et al. ’s method uniformly embedded 1 bit into each pixel irrespective of the local complexity, and thus, the embedding capacity is limited. To this end, an improved RDH-CE method is proposed in this paper. Considering that the complexity evaluation plays a vital role in both contrast enhancement and payload increase, we improve embedding performance by including left-bottom neighbors of a pixel into complexity evaluation. Compared with one single feature in Jafar et al. ’s method, we extract multiple features to assist K-means clustering such that a better cluster performance is obtained. In addition, our method provides an adaptive pixel modification strategy based on the local complexity, in which we can adaptively embed 1 or 2 bits into a pixel according to the corresponding complexity. By these three improvements, our method is capable of achieving high capacity while enhancing contrast. The experimental results also show that our method achieves higher accuracy of the complexity evaluation, larger payload, and better local contrast enhancement than those existing RDH-CE related methods.