Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Kiyoshi Tanaka
Faculty of Engineering,
Shinshu University, Japan.
Email: ktanaka@shinshu-u.ac.jp
I. I NTRODUCTION
Traditionally, encryption aims to hide the meaning of the
message being transmitted while data embedding aims to insert
external information into a host content [1]. The ubiquitous
existence of multimedia content in our daily life (e.g., video,
music) had driven the research community to invent content
encryption algorithms [2], especially for image since it is
widely used in various industries and it is the basis in coding
moving pictures. Similarly, various data embedding methods
are proposed to enhance features of multimedia content such as
watermarking, nger printing, hyper-linking, and so forth [3].
These disciplines are usually studied independently, but
recently there are effort in consolidating the features of both to
handle image/video. For example, Kundur et al. [4] propose to
encrypt a video prior to broadcasting (to avoid unauthorized
viewing) and ngerprint the video upon decryption to trace
illegal redistribution. In [5], Lian et al. assigned the role of data
embedding to DCT coefcients in a H.264 compressed video
while degrading quality of the video by means of ipping
the sign of DCT coefcients and modifying the prediction
modes in all I-frames. For other approaches that consolidate
encryption and data embedding, we refer the interested reader
to [6], [7], [8].
Reversibility is a common feature in encryption, but most
of the methods (those that consolidate both features) are not
completely reversible as a whole. However, reversibility is particularly crucial in applications where any form of distortion
is not tolerable (e.g., medical and military imaging). Due to
this reason, reversible data embedding method is an active
978-0-7695-4712-1/12 $26.00 2012 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/IIH-MSP.2012.94
/ /
^ /
D
Z
Z
Z W /
W Z
Z W
Z Z
EZ EZ
EZ
EZ W
EZ W /
W EZ
Fig. 1.
Fig. 2(a) and (b) show the original Lenna image and its
output when all RBs are embedded with payload, respectively.
As we can see in Fig. 2(b), outline of output image is
visible because NRBs are not processed. Therefore, NRBs
are also processed to carry information and achieve distortion.
In particular, the unoccupied pixel values in each NRB, i.e.,
[0, min 1] and [max +1, 2 1], are identied and referred
to as available spaces. Then, selected pixels in the range
[min , max ] are associated with unoccupied values for data
embedding purposes. Here, the unoccupied values are associated with the nearest (in terms of difference in pixel values)
occupied pixels. For instance, suppose max = 253, min =
14, and hence = 240. There are 16 unoccupied pixel
values in , namely, integer values in [0, 13] and [254, 255],
and they are associated with occupied pixel values to embed
information. The association is based on + min for
[0, 13] and (2 1 max ) for [254, 255].
For that, NRB can hold at most 1 bpp because some of the
occupied pixel values are not associated with any unoccupied
values. The output image obtained by embedding data into all
RBs and NRBs in Lenna is shown in Fig. 2(c).
Note that min and have to be recorded to completely
reconstruct RBs. If both of these information are encoded in
a raw format, the number of bits needed per block is 11 bits (8
for min and 3 for ). The original distribution of min is as
shown in Fig. 3(a) and there is little to gain by entropy coding.
Instead of the raw min , the difference, i.e., min+1 min is
considered and its distribution shown in Fig. 3(b) suggests that
entropy coding can reduce size of the side information. On the
other hand, to completely reconstruct NRBs, both min and
max are required. min will be coded in differential mode as
in the RB case, but max will be coded in raw format.
A location map of size /( ) is stored to indicate
if a block is RB or NRB. In terms of the syntax of the side
information during data embedding, for any block , the prex
codeword encoding min is rst output. If it is a RB, 1 is
TABLE I
S UB -C ATEGORIES IN A R EFLECTIVE B LOCK FOR IMAGE OF 8- BITS DEPTH
Range,
Number of Partitions
Number of Bits Embedded,
65 - 128
2
1
33 - 64
4
2
17 - 32
8
3
9 - 16
16
4
5-8
32
5
3-4
64
6
2
128
7
1
256
8
364
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
22
Raw
Eff.
1.00
-1.49
1.96
-0.53
2.81
0.32
3.49
1.00
3.88
1.39
4.02
1.53
4.06
1.57
4.06
1.57
TABLE II
AVERAGE R AW AND E FFECTIVE E MBEDDING C APACITY USING P ROPOSED M ETHOD ( BPP )
44
88
1616
3232
6464
128128
256256
Raw
Eff.
Raw
Eff.
Raw
Eff.
Raw
Eff
Raw
Eff.
Raw
Eff.
Raw
Eff.
1.00
0.35
0.97
0.79
0.89
0.84
0.76
0.74
0.54
0.54
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
1.80
1.15
1.58
1.40
1.29
1.24
0.95
0.93
0.59
0.58
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
2.42
1.77
1.98
1.80
1.49
1.44
1.01
1.00
0.60
0.59
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
2.78
2.13
2.14
1.96
1.54
1.49
1.02
1.01
0.60
0.59
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
2.89
2.24
2.17
1.99
1.55
1.50
1.03
1.01
0.60
0.59
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
2.90
2.25
2.17
1.99
1.55
1.50
1.03
1.01
0.60
0.59
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
2.91
2.26
2.17
1.99
1.55
1.50
1.03
1.01
0.60
0.59
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
2.91
2.26
2.17
1.99
1.55
1.50
1.03
1.01
0.60
0.59
0.29
0.29
0.15
0.15
700
Frequency
Frequency
5000
500
400
300
200
4000
3000
2000
1000
100
6000
600
50
100
150
Block Min
(a)
Fig. 3.
200
250
0
150
100
50
50
100
150
512512
Raw
Eff.
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
0.08
200
Block Difference
(b)
TABLE III
S IDE I NFORMATION (GR-R EMAINDER = 16) FOR D IFFERENT B LOCK
S IZES IN L ENNA ( BPB )
365
TABLE IV
E MBEDDING C APACITY ( IN BITS ) FOR THE P ROPOSED M ETHOD AND [9]
Test Image
Airplane
Baboon
Boat
Lake
Lenna
Proposed Method
690657
297969
480848 476096 621610
Ni et al. [9]
16171
5421
7301
14310
5460
TABLE V
E MBEDDING C APACITY ( IN BPP ) FOR P ROPOSED M ETHOD AND VQD [14]
Block Size,
22 44 88 1616 3232
Proposed Method
1.57
2.26
1.99
1.50
1.01
VQD
1.49
2.00
1.36
0.58
0.15
Fig. 4.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a reversible data hiding method based on histogram manipulation with scalability in visual quality degradation was proposed. Non-occuring pixel values were associated
with occuring ones and the associations were utilized to embed
external payload. The distortion caused by data embedding
was further intensied by shufing pixels in blocks of predened size. It was found that visual quality degradation of
366