Color image reversible data hiding based on multi-channel synchronized histogram

Reversible data hiding (RDH) has been generally utilized in copyright protection and content integrity authentication for multimedia. In general, many typical RDH schemes are based on grayscale images. Considering that color images are widely employed in daily life, color image based RDH should be significantly concerned. Recently, color image based RDH is rare and those schemes are mostly empirically designed, which means that embedding capacity is manually allocated between different channels (such as RGB channels). In addition, most existing algorithms only focus on designing effective prediction methods to utilize the correlation in each channel, which means that the correlation between different channels is insufficiently employed and thus the algorithm performance is limited. Therefore, in this paper, the correlation between those different channels is sufficiently considered and an adaptive capacity allocation framework is proposed instead of empirical schemes. Moreover, the construction of a new synchronous histogram associated with the above-mentioned capacity allocation algorithm is proposed to further improve its performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme compared with other state-of-the-art ones.