High performance reversible data hiding scheme through multilevel histogram modification in lifting integer wavelet transform

This paper proposes a digital image reversible data hiding method in integer lifting transform domain. Owing to the characteristics of the natural image statistics, the neighbor pixel values are similar mostly and hence their differences are observed to be close or equal to zero. A histogram constructed out of this difference factor is exploited for reversible data embedding. Further, data is embedded at multiple levels in the integer lifting wavelet transform domain and hence the proposed scheme facilitates higher payload capacity and exceptional perceptual quality than the conventional single level histogram based techniques. The additional information involved for restoring the cover image and the secret payload is also less compared to the conventional schemes, as the proposed method employs a single parameter called “Embedding Level” for both hiding as well as extraction. Extensive experimentation with huge database of images, five existing RDH schemes and against seven steganalysers, shows that the proposed RDH scheme outperforms other schemes and proves to be a high performance RDH scheme in terms of all the desirable features of a reversible data hiding system like high payload, imperceptible, robustness, losslessness and minimal side information.