TY - JOUR
T1 - Reversible Data Hiding with a New Local Contrast Enhancement Approach
AU - Fragoso-Navarro, Eduardo
AU - Cedillo-Hernandez, Manuel
AU - Garcia-Ugalde, Francisco
AU - Morelos-Zaragoza, Robert
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2022/3/1
Y1 - 2022/3/1
N2 - Reversible data hiding schemes hide information into a digital image and simultaneously increase its contrast. The improvements of the different approaches aim to increase the capacity, contrast, and quality of the image. However, recent proposals contrast the image globally and lose local details since they use two common methodologies that may not contribute to obtaining better results. Firstly, to generate vacancies for hiding information, most schemes start with a preprocessing applied to the histogram that may introduce visual distortions and set the maximum hiding rate in advance. Secondly, just a few hiding ranges are selected in the histogram, which means that just limited contrast and capacity may be achieved. To solve these problems, in this paper, a novel approach without preprocessing performs an automatic selection of multiple hiding ranges into the histograms. The selection stage is based on an optimization process, and the iterative-based algorithm increases capacity at embedding execution. Results show that quality and capacity values overcome previous approaches. Additionally, visual results show how greyscale values are better differentiated in the image, revealing details globally and locally.
AB - Reversible data hiding schemes hide information into a digital image and simultaneously increase its contrast. The improvements of the different approaches aim to increase the capacity, contrast, and quality of the image. However, recent proposals contrast the image globally and lose local details since they use two common methodologies that may not contribute to obtaining better results. Firstly, to generate vacancies for hiding information, most schemes start with a preprocessing applied to the histogram that may introduce visual distortions and set the maximum hiding rate in advance. Secondly, just a few hiding ranges are selected in the histogram, which means that just limited contrast and capacity may be achieved. To solve these problems, in this paper, a novel approach without preprocessing performs an automatic selection of multiple hiding ranges into the histograms. The selection stage is based on an optimization process, and the iterative-based algorithm increases capacity at embedding execution. Results show that quality and capacity values overcome previous approaches. Additionally, visual results show how greyscale values are better differentiated in the image, revealing details globally and locally.
KW - Contrast enhancement
KW - Histogram shifting
KW - Image processing
KW - Information security
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85126277580&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3390/math10050841
DO - 10.3390/math10050841
M3 - Artículo
AN - SCOPUS:85126277580
SN - 2227-7390
VL - 10
JO - Mathematics
JF - Mathematics
IS - 5
M1 - 841
ER -