Pixel Value Ordering Based Reversible Data Hiding with Novel MPBS Strategy

Abstract

Recently, Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) techniques has gained much attention in many sensitive fields such as remote sensing, archive management, military and medical image processing systems. This is due to the lossless data extraction ability of RDH schemes. The primary goal of RDH schemes is to achieve high embedding rates while maintaining the quality of cover objects. For achieving better performance, Pixel Value Ordering (PVO) based reversible data hiding schemes have been proposed. PVO refers to the process of ranking the pixels in blocks and then modifying the pixels according to some embedding rules/conditions. So far, the existing PVO techniques have considered neighborhood pixels at unit distance. In this paper, an improved RDH using block based PVO scheme is proposed which exploits the pixel correlation efficiently by increasing the block size and applying a novel Median Pixel based Block Selection Strategy (MPBS). When block size is increased, the ordering of pixels is changed after embedding. So, to extract the secret data in a lossless manner, the secret bits are swapped in accordance with their corresponding Stego pixels’ index order. Also, the overflow and underflow conditions are effectively handled using Location Map. Experimental results show the better performance of the proposed RDH technique with the existing technique.