A Novel Reversible Data Hiding Scheme Using Ripple Strategy and Histogram Shifting

In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding method based on pixel difference histogram shifting and ripple strategy. Because the local area has similar pixel value distribution in the natural image, the pixel differences will be narrowed down within a small range. The ripple strategy is used to calculate the pixel difference using the pixels in the outer ripple to subtract the pixels in the inner ripples. Also, we found that the three highest pixel difference bins occure most frequently at -1, 0, and 1, thus the proposed method need not remember the peak-point and zero-point information for secret extraction and image recovering. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than Huang and Chang's method in terms of the embedding capacity.