Local Moment Driven PVO Based Reversible Data Hiding

Pixel-value-ordering (PVO) is one of the most widely used reversible data hiding (RDH) framework which efficiently utilizes smooth pixels of the cover image to provide high-fidelity stego-image but with limited embedding capacity. This letter proposes an RDH scheme based on local moment driven pixel value ordering (LM-PVO) which further enhances the effectiveness of smooth pixel's utilization by dividing the fixed-size blocks into two groups. Pixels of each group are sub-divided into two sub-groups based on the local moment of the block so that correlation among the pixels of each sub-group is enhanced. Thus doing, the pixels of each sub-group are grouped based on their intensity values instead of their position as in the conventional PVO-based schemes; this enables information hider to embed a higher amount of secret data while also enhancing the stego-image quality. Experimental results also validate the superiority of the proposed scheme over the existing PVO-based RDH schemes.