Reversible data hiding without side information

Reversible data hiding algorithms based on histogram shift generate side information in the process of data embedding. The side information can be regarded as a secret key to extract the embedded data but its size generally increases proportionally to the amount of embedded data. To overcome this problem, the side information is included as some parts of embedded data in the proposed reversible data hiding algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can embed a large amount of pure data while keeping high visual quality without the side information.