Reversible Data Hiding with Hierarchical Relationships

In this paper, we propose a new method for reversible data hiding by employing the hierarchical relationships of original images. Considering the ease of implementation and the little overhead needed for decoding, we employ the histogram-based scheme with extensions for reversible data hiding. By utilizing the hierarchical structure and corresponding histograms of difference values, global and local characteristics of original images can be utilized for hiding more capacity with acceptable quality of output image. With our method, better performances can be obtained in enhanced image quality, embedding capacity, and comparable amount of side information. More importantly, the reversibility of our method is guaranteed, meaning that original image and hidden message can both be perfectly recovered at the decoder. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed method in this paper outperforms those in conventional histogram-based algorithms.