Reversible Data Hiding Using Controlled Contrast Enhancement and Integer Wavelet Transform

The conventional reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithms pursue high Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) at the certain amount of embedding bits. Recently, Wu et al. deemed that the improvement of image visual quality is more important than keeping high PSNR. Based on this viewpoint, they presented a novel RDH scheme, utilizing contrast enhancement to replace the PSNR. However, when a large number of bits are embedded, image contrast is over-enhanced, which introduces obvious distortion for human visual perception. Motivated by this issue, a new RDH scheme is proposed using the controlled contrast enhancement (CCE) and Haar integer wavelet transform (IWT). The proposed scheme has large embedding capacity while maintaining satisfactory visual perception. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.