2016 3rd International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS -2016), Jan.
22 – 23, 2016, Coimbatore, INDIA
Survey on Reversible Data Hiding Techniques
Rathika R
PG Scholar, Dept. of CSE,
Government College of Technology, Coimbatore,
rathikagctcse@gmail.com
Abstract- Data transmissions using computer networks has
created the need for security. Many robust message encryption
techniques have been developed to supply this demand.
Steganography is one form of cryptography where we hide data
within large texts or images. Reversible data hiding can be
considered as a form of steganography in which we hide data
within images, but with a variation that, in reversible data hiding
the original cover can be recovered losslessly after the embedded
messages are extracted. This paper presents a detailed survey on
various techniques available for RDH. The techniques include
Histogram shifting, LSB modification method, Difference
Expansion, Interpolation Technique.
Keywords: RDH, Histogram Shifting, Interpolation Technique,
Difference Expansion.
I. INTRODUCTION
Advancements in computer networks, signal processing
and digital multimedia are spread widely through the Internet
nowadays. This causes security issues of exposing transmitted
digital data on the network with high risk of being copied or
intercepted illegally. In order to safeguard the privacy of data,
various cryptographic techniques have been proposed to
encrypt the data before data transmission. However, with
considerable increase in computing powers of modern
computers, the security of the data yielded by these
cryptographic techniques is threatened. In addition, though
cryptographic techniques encrypt secret images before
transmission, the apparent appearances of the encrypted
message would easily arouse suspicion and bring unexpected
attacks from hackers. Information hiding techniques provides
another solution in protecting digital media. Such techniques
may be employed to embed secret information into cover
media, in such a way that the existence of the hidden
information is invisible but known only to a preconcert
recipient. Nowadays huge attention is paid to Reversible Data
Hiding (RDH) of encrypted images, since it has the excellent
property that the original cover can be lossless restored after
the embedded data is extracted while protecting the image
content’s confidentiality. This technique is useful in
applications such as medical and imaging where the original
image must not be altered after the embedded data are
extracted. Essentially, RDH is realized by the use of
redundancy in the original image. The two important
requirements for RDH techniques: The embedding capacity
should be large and distortion should be low. There is always
[978-1-4673-9206-8/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE]
Prof.S.Kumaresan
Professor and Head, Dept. of CSE,
Government College of Technology, Coimbatore,
sukumaresan@gct.ac.in
a conflict between these two requirements. In general, a higher
embedding capacity results in a higher degree of distortion.
Figure 1 General Block Diagram of RDH
In Fig 1, an overall view of the Reversible Data Hiding
process. I represent the image and D, the data to be hidden.
These two data are fed into the embed block which hides the
message bits into the image. This image is represented by ID.
When ID is fed into the extract/reverse block produces the
original image after extracting the data. The restored image IR
is same as the original image.
Reversible Data Hiding techniques can be employed to
retrieve stego images to their pristine states after the extraction
of hidden data. This techniques can be classified into three
groups-Based on data compression, Based on pixel value
difference expansion, based on histogram shifting. Various
techniques are available for the Reversible Data Hiding
process. One of the popular approaches is the difference
expansion (DE) method in which difference of pixel groups
are calculated and expanded to accommodate additional bits.
Histogram shift mechanism utilizes the zero and peak points
of the histogram image and lightly modifies the pixel gray
values to embed data into the image. Reversible Data Hiding
technique for binary images is Pair-Wise Logical Computation
(PWLC). It uses XOR binary operations to store the payload
in the host image. The image boundaries are chosen to hide
data. Interpolation technique can be embedding a large amount
of data into images with imperceptible modification. Due to
the slight modifications of pixels, high image quality is
preserved. This technique is more useful in applications where
the original image remains intact even after data embedded is
retrieved. Consider multimedia archival for military and
medical for valuable works. In such applications, minute
change in pixel is not accepted. Every bit of embedded data is
important. Any change occurs, it affects the hidden data and
raw data, access to original is required. Buyer-Seller systems
are also implemented using Reversible data hiding technique.
 2016 3rd International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS -2016), Jan. 22 – 23, 2016, Coimbatore, INDIA
In this case a seller encrypts the data and embeds an encrypted
fingerprint given by buyer. Seller will not be able to get
fingerprints of buyer until the buyer does not make payment
he will not be able to access the original version of data.
II. ESTEEMED CONTRIBUTIONS
This section presents a description of the various
techniques for reversible data hiding. Each method offers
several advantages and also has its own limitations.
A. LSB MODIFICATION
A novel reversible data hiding technique enables the
exact discovery of the original image after extracting the
embedded information. LSB (Least Significant Bit)
modification is proposed as the data embedding method,
which introduces additional operating points on the capacity-
distortion(C-D) curve. It modifies the lowest levels instead of
bit planes of the host image to accommodate the payload
information. A prediction based conditional entropy coder
utilizes static portions of the host as side-information.
Information bits are embedded by modifying the selected
features of the host image. It will improve the compression
efficiency and lossless data embedding capacity.
B. HISTOGRAM SHIFTING
In this method, [3] zero or minimum points of the
histogram of an image are utilized and the pixel gray scale
values slightly modified to embed a large amount of data (5-
80 kb) into the original image. It keeps good quality of the
natural images, specifically PSNR value of marked image is
guaranteed above 48 dB. For embedding process, the main
goal of finding the peak point is to increase the embedding
capacity as large as possible. The number of pixels associated
with the peak point equals to the number of bits that can be
embedded into an image.
First, histogram of the image H(x) is generated and
maximum and minimum points (a, b) are found. If the
minimum point H(b) > 0, recode the coordinate of those pixels
and set as H(b)=0. Then without loss of generality, Move the
whole part of the histogram with to the right by 1 unit. This
method can be applied for all type of images and videos which
consist of sequential of images. It provides a low
computational complexity and a faster execution time.
C. DATA EMBEDDING USING DIFFERENCE
EXPANSION
Recently, [4] Reversible Data Embedding has drawn
lots of interest. Being reversible, the original digital content
can be completely restored. A common approach of high
capacity Reversible Data Embedding is to select an embedding
area. DE technique discovers extra storage space by exploring
the redundancy in the image content. In digital image, one can
select the expandable difference values of pixels and embed
one bit into each of them to extract the embedded data and to
restore the original values, the decoder needs to know which
difference values have been selected for the DE. Location map
contains the location information of all selected expandable
difference values. It also embedded into the marked image.
This method suits all audio and videos with limited payload
capacity.
D. PREDICTION ERROR EXPANSION
Reversible watermarking [9] is a method of
embedding useful information in a digital work (audio, image,
video) without any loss of host information for the purpose of
copy control, content authentication, distribution tracking,
broadcast monitoring etc. The drawbacks of difference
expansion method is analysed and propose an improved
approach that incorporates a histogram technique. It helps to
increase the capacity control and undesirable distortion at low
embedding capacities. Combinations of histogram shifting and
difference expansion two algorithms are introduced. The first
one uses a highly compressible overflow map and the second
one uses flag bits. Prediction Error based technique exploits
the inherent correlation in the neighborhood of a pixel better
than the Difference Expansion scheme. The maximal
embedding capacity of a PE-base embedding technique in a
single pass is 1 bpp, which is double the maximal capacity of
0.5 bpp for a DE based embedding technique. It offers a
significant improvement in the quality of the watermarked
image, especially at moderate embedding capacities.
E. INTERPOLATION TECHNIQUE
An interpolation technique [8] can embed a large
amount of covert data into images with imperceptible
modification. It utilizes the interpolation error, the difference
between interpolation value and corresponding pixel value, to
embed bit by expanding it additively or leaving it unchanged.
The data embedding approach of this proposed scheme,
namely preservative interpolation error expansion, is a kind of
DE. But it is different from most DE approaches in two
aspects. One is it uses interpolation error instead of inter pixel
difference or prediction error to embed data. Secondly, it
expands difference by addition instead of bit shifting. The
advantages of this method are that the distortion of
preservative expansion is smaller since each pixel is altered at
most by 1. It does not require a location map to tell between
expanded interpolation errors. Interpolation errors are more
expandable than inter pixel differences or prediction errors. It
guarantees high image quality without sacrificing embedding
capacity.
F. OPTIMAL WEIGHT BASED PREDICTION SCHEME
In this paper [14], a weight based prediction scheme
is presented to improve the performance of many reversible
histogram based data hiding approach. From least-squares
problem, we obtain the optimal set of loads for the
neighbouring pixels to enhance the prediction accuracy of the
prospective pixel across the entire image. The level of the
peak points in the histogram can then be evaluated to boost the
embedding capacity. The proposed technology improved the
embedding volume upon many techniques and still retained
the caliber of stego images.
 2016 3rd International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS -2016), Jan. 22 – 23, 2016, Coimbatore, INDIA

G. EFFICIENT COMPRESSION OF ENCRYPTED o Watermark insertion protocol

IMAGES
Wei Liu et.al suggested a lossless compression
method for encrypted gray image which used progressive
decomposition and punctured turbo codes that were rate-
compatible. In this method they developed resolution
progressive compression, which had much better coding
efficiency and a lesser computational complexity. Wei Liu
et.al observed that lossless compression of encrypted sources
can be achieved through Slepian-Wolf coding. It is being tried
to improve the compression efficiency for encrypted real-
world sources such as images. In this paper, a resolution
progressive compression scheme compressed an encrypted
image progressively in resolution, so that the decoder
observed a low-resolution version of the image, study local
statistics based on it, and used the statistics to decode the next
resolution level. Resolution progressive compression which
has much better coding efficiency and less computational
complexity than existing approaches was used in this problem.
H. BUYER-SELLER PROTOCOL
Memon et.al [3] proposed an interactive protocol for
invisible watermarking in which the seller will not know the
exact watermarked copy that the buyer receives. Hence, the
copies of the original content containing the buyer’s
watermark cannot be created by the seller. However, in case
the seller finds an unauthorized copy has originated, it can be
determined from which buyer it originated and furthermore
this can be proved to a third party by means of dispute
resolution protocol. But the reverse process is not possible i.e.,
the buyer cannot claim an unauthorized copy originating from
the seller. The dispute resolution protocol is a three-party
protocol which requires the buyer to participate to prove his
innocence in case the seller accuses him of making
unauthorized copies. If a buyer refuses to participate then it
would be taken as an admission of guilt on the buyer’s part.
The buyer-seller watermarking protocol has four sub
protocols.
o Watermark generation protocol
o Copyright violation detection protocol
o Dispute resolution protocol
I. RDH IN ENCRYPTED IMAGES
Zhang [9] proposed a Reversible Data Hiding
technique for encrypted images. It includes encryption of the
image, embedding data and data extraction image recovery
phases. The data of original image is encrypted entirely by a
stream cipher. This method offers a low computational
complexity. The following steps describe the entire scheme.
o A data hider can embed additional data into the
encrypted image by modifying a part of encrypted
data. This data hider need not necessarily know the
original content of the encryption image.
o Using the encrypted image containing embedded
data, a receiver first decrypts it using the encryption
key, and the decrypted version is similar to the
original image.
o The embedded data can be correctly extracted while
the original image can be perfectly restored using the
data hiding key with the assistance of spatial
correlation in natural image.
J. SIDE MATCH MECHANISM
The previous paper poses two issues. The data
extraction and image recovery can be achieved by examining
the block smoothness. Zhang’s [9] work did not fully exploit
the pixels in calculating the smoothness of each block and also
the pixel correlations in the border of neighboring blocks were
not considered. These two issues could reduce the correctness
of data extraction. This decreases the error rate of extracted
bits.
III. COMPARISON OF THE VARIOUS TECHNIQUES
The following Table 1 summarizes the techniques of RDH
with various advantages and describes its limitations.

Table 1 Summary of RDH Techniques

RDH TECHNIQUES DESCRIPTION MERITS DEMERITS

LSB modification method Each signal sample is over written -High embedding Higher distortion in the
by a payload data bit capacity restored image

Utilizes the minimum points of -Execution time is Uncompressed image

Histogram shifting
Difference Expansion
the histogram and slightly short. used for embedding.
modifies the pixel gray scale -Applicable to videos
value to embed data.
Select some expandable -Applied to audio and
difference values of pixels and video as well. Computational
embed one bit into each of them. -visual quality of complexity is high.
image is high.
 2016 3rd International Conference on Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS -2016), Jan. 22 – 23, 2016, Coimbatore, INDIA

Exploits the correlation inherent -Increase the capacity

Prediction error expansion
Optimal transfer mechanism
in the neighborhoods of a pixel control -undesirable Uncompressed image
better than the Difference distortion at low used for embedding.
Expansion scheme. embedding capacities.
Gives a new role of value -Better performance
modification and can be used on -Estimation errors Computational
various cover values. closer to zero. complexity is high.

utilizes the interpolation error, the -It guarantees high

Interpolation technique
difference between interpolation image quality without
value and corresponding pixel sacrificing embedding Uncompressed image
value, to embed bit by expanding capacity. used for embedding.
it additively or leaving it -computational cost is
unchanged very small.

IV. CONCLUSION pairs,” in Image Analysis and Recognition. Berlin,

Thus this paper provides a brief description of the various
techniques used for reversible data hiding. All these
techniques aim at reproducing the original image in which the
data was hidden with maximum accuracy.
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