PVO-Based Reversible Data Hiding Using Two-Stage Embedding and FPM Mode Selection

Pixel value ordering (PVO) is an efficient method for implementing reversible data hiding, which can achieve embedding based on overlapping pixel blocks when combined with the flexible patch moving (FPM) mode, especially the two-dimensional (2D) FPM mode. However, the existing 2D FPM mode, whose pairing way of prediction error is not conducive to generating more pixel blocks available for embedding, and whose movement rules are too inefficient to fully exploit the potential of the PVO, results in wasting many available blocks. Therefore, in this paper, a two-stage embedding mechanism is proposed for the 2D FPM mode, in which the combination of prediction errors is adjusted to improve the possibility of generating available blocks and the two-stage embedding doubles the number of pixel blocks available for embedding. Furthermore, an FPM mode selection is proposed, where four novel 2D FPM modes are designed to efficiently exploit the potential of the PVO according to the different directional gradients. Lastly, a set of efficient 2D mappings is well-designed for multiple histograms to achieve lower embedding distortion. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of embedding capacity and image fidelity. The average peak signal-to-noise ratio for the Kodak image dataset is as high as 63.62 dB after embedding 10,000 bits.