Reversible Data Hiding with Visual Effect Enhancement for Subjectively Low Quality Saturated Images

Abstract

Reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement (RDH-CE) hides data in cover images while improving the image contrast, and thus is particularly effective for un-saturated images and medical images. In RDH-CE, image contrast is enhanced by expanding and spreading the histogram towards the lowest and highest gray-scales. However, there exist quite a few low quality images which are saturated or near-saturated but with rather low visually-illustrated regions of interest. For these images, enhancing the visual effect in the texture areas obviously outweighs improving the image contrast and preserving image fidelity. This paper aims at improving the visual texture effect by adaptively selecting histogram bins and reducing the distortion to structure similarity. Experimental results show that the proposed method obviously enhances the visual effects in texture areas while reducing structure distortion.