Saliency-Based Image Contrast Enhancement with Reversible Data Hiding

Reversible data hiding (RDH) has become a hot research area in the recent years due to its wide applications such as authentication. Among all the RDH methods proposed, contrast enhancement based reversible data hiding is one that was recently proposed. However, most of the existing schemes proposed focus on image itself without taking human visual system (HVS) into account. Consequently, the full range of the redundancy from HVS cannot be fully exploited, and the resulting image may be visually unpleasing. In this paper, a new approach is proposed by introducing the visual saliency into the process of reversible data hiding. Specifically, a saliency fixation map is generated by using an existing saliency prediction model, followed by a saliency guided segmentation to better enhance the salient regions in the input image. The evaluation results show that the proposed method yields better visual results and outperforms the existing methods in statistical metrics.