Pixel-Value-Ordering based Reversible Information Hiding Scheme with Self-Adaptive Threshold Strategy

• Main Authors: Tzu-Chuen Lu, Chun-Ya Tseng, Shu-Wen Huang, Thanh Nhan Vo.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-12-01
• Series: Symmetry
• Subjects: reversible information hiding; pixel value ordering; PVO; quantification strategy
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/10/12/764

Pixel value ordering (PVO) hiding scheme is a kind of data embedding technique that hides a secret message in the difference of the largest and second largest pixels of a block. After that, the scholars improved PVO scheme by using a threshold to determine whether the block is smooth or complex. Only a smooth block can be used to hide information. The researchers analyzed all the possible thresholds to find the proper one for hiding secret message. However, it is time consuming. Some researchers decomposing the smooth block into four smaller blocks for hiding more messages to increase image quality. However, the complexity of the block is more important than block size. Hence, this study proposes an ameliorated method. The proposed scheme analyzes the variation of the region so as to judge the complexity of the block and applies quantification strategy to quantified the pixel for making sure the pixel is reversible. It adopts an adaptive threshold generation mechanism to find the proper threshold for different images. The results show that the image quality of the proposed scheme is higher than that of the other methods. The proposed scheme can also let the user adjust the hiding rate to achieve higher image quality or hiding capacity.