A fast performance estimation scheme for histogram shifting based multi-layer embedding

Histogram shifting technique, as a general lossless data hiding scheme, leads to a good quality for the stego-image but the embedding capacity is limited. To enhance the capacity, histogram shifting would be always operated by multiple embedding, which uses multiple pairs of peak and zero points at a time, or multi-layer embedding, which utilizes one pair of peak and zero point each time and then repeating many times based on the resulting image. Although the performance of multi-layer embedding approach outperforms that of multiple embedding, it is, however, much more time-consuming. A fast performance estimation scheme for multi-layer embedding is proposed in the paper, which provides a fast and accurate capacity and quality estimation based only on the histogram information. The proposed scheme provides a fast assessment whether the multi-layer embedding approach is an appropriate reversible watermarking method for the given secret data and host image.