Histogram shifting based reversible data hiding with controlled contrast enhancement

This paper presents an improved reversible data hiding algorithm using digital images based on the histogram shifting technique. Proposed method can accurately recover the original image and extract the hidden data accurately. The highest two peak values of the host image's histogram are selected for data hiding. This embedding process is repeated again and again, to attain larger embedding capacity. In addition, a Controlled Contrast Enhancement (CCE) is performed to get good visual perception. To verify the robustness of the proposed method various attacks on the host image such as impulse noise, shearing, rotation, and scaling are considered. The proposed algorithm efficiently removes the various attacks on the watermarked image and efficiently recovers the original and embedded data. The proposed method's better performance over existing methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM and embedding rate is demonstrated.