Reversible data hiding based on pixel segmentation and prediction for improving hiding capacity

The idea of the traditional histogram shifting technique is to hide a message within the cover-image pixel distribution. However, the embedding capacity is limited by the peak point occurrences. To solve this problem, many reversible data hiding (RDH) techniques are developed to combine pixel prediction and histogram shifting to increase the embedding payload. In this paper, a RDH scheme based on chessboard prediction and pixel partitioning is proposed for enhancing the hiding payload. Pixel partitioning is used to separate a pixel into two parts: most significant bit and least significant bit. Then, the chessboard predictor is adopted to generate prediction errors and separate the pixels. Thereafter, histogram shifting is applied to embed the secret messages into prediction errors. Due to the high similarity of adjacent pixels in an image, the generated prediction errors are highly close to zero, resulting in a large embedding space. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method has superior performance in embedding capacity with acceptable image visual quality compared to existing schemes since it adopts the adaptive adjustment strategy to achieve this improved balance.