A high performance reversible watermarking scheme based on histogram shifting

In recent years, histogram shifting based reversible watermarking has become the domain of extensive research due to its high stego-image quality. Most related schemes are required to transmit extra side information, e.g. peak and zero point pairs, and therefore are non blind in nature. The existing blind schemes, however, exhibit relatively poor performance due to the adoption of fixed peak and zero point pairs. This paper presents a histogram shifting based multi-level embedding scheme for blind reversible watermarking. For single level embedding, a two-step embedding (TSE) approach is proposed, which hides the side information in the stego-image generated with first embedding for blind requirement. While for multi-level embedding, a chain embedding is further incorporated, which ensures both the blind requirement and adoption of optimal peak and zero point pair in each level for high performance reversible watermarking. Extensive simulations are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed scheme could not only achieve the blind reversible watermarking but also outperform other similar ones. Copyright © 2012 Acta Automatica Sinica. All rights reserved.