Reversible data hiding with oriented and minimized distortions using cascading trellis coding

• A novel cascading trellis coding algorithm is proposed.
• A novel data hiding scheme with oriented and minimized distortions is proposed.
• An application scheme that develops the DOM algorithm in DWT domain is proposed.

Reversible data hiding technique usually generates low-quality images when the relative payload is high. This paper proposes a novel, reversible data hiding scheme that provides improved performances. First, a distortion-oriented, minimized, (DOM) embedding algorithm is proposed. By using a cascading trellis coding algorithm, the overall modifications to the host coefficients are minimal, and some specified host coefficients are kept intact. Following that, the proposed DOM algorithm is used in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain. To increase the payload, both the scaling coefficients and the wavelet coefficients are involved in computation. However, by using the DOM algorithm, the scaling coefficients are kept unchanged. By these approaches, the proposed scheme provides high quality to the stego image and reversibility to the host image without the problems of overflow and underflow. Furthermore, by using a multi-round embedding operation, a high payload is achieved. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art reversible hiding schemes.