Reversible Data Hiding in Binary Images by Symmetrical Flipping Degree Histogram Modification

Abstract

The visual qualities are limited in marked images by using the existing reversible data hiding (RDH) methods. In this paper, we propose a novel RDH method based on symmetrical flipping degree (SFD) histogram modification. First, the SFD which are a score to measure the distance between the pixels in the block is obtained. The better the visual quality a block has which is with a small SFD. Then the symmetrical flipping groups (SFGs) are generated from the SFD histogram. For its pre-processing, the SFGs with larger SFDs are utilized by flipping the blocks with smallest appearance times. The selected blocks with a large SFD in an SFG and least appearance times are selected to be flipped so that the new blocks are with the symmetrical SFD and in other SFG. Finally, in the blocks with a larger SFD, the appropriate corresponding pixels are selected adaptively to flip for information embedding. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed method and under the same embedding capacity, the visual quality is satisfactory.