Multilevel data hiding for embedding reversibility upon improving histogram shifting

This paper presents a multilevel reversible data hiding method based on histogram shifting which can recover the original image in lossless way after the hidden data has been extracted from the stego image. The method generates a residual image using the prediction method to explore the similarity of neighboring and residual image, which comes from the difference between central pixel and its neighboring pixels, is used to hide the information. We also apply an improved histogram shifting method to select two peak points for achieving high embedding capacity. Our experimental results and analytical reasoning shows that the proposed scheme has higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and high data embedding capacity than that of other reversible data hiding methods presented in the literature. Even in the case of multiple levels embedding the PSNR remains in the perceptible range of human vision.