Adaptive reversible watermarking with improved embedding capacity

• We generalize the histogram shifting technique to produce the embedding capacity larger than 1.0 bpp in single-pass embedding.
• We design an estimation function to estimate the performance of CALIC.
• The pixels with small prediction error are adaptively selected to embed more than one bit of watermark.

Embedding capacity is one of the most important issues of the reversible watermarking. However, the theoretical maximum embedding capacity of most reversible watermarking algorithms is only 1.0 bits per pixel (bpp). To achieve a higher capacity, we have to modify the least significant bit (LSB) multiple times which definitely lowers the quality of the embedded image. To this end, this paper proposes a novel reversible watermarking algorithm by employing histogram shifting and adaptive embedding. Specifically, the amount of the embedded watermark is adaptively determined in terms of the context of each pixel. For pixels with small prediction error, we modify the second, third and even the fourth LSBs as well to embed more than one watermark bit. Consequently, the proposed method achieves the embedding capacity larger than 1.0 bpp in single-pass embedding as well as bringing relatively low embedding distortion. The superiority of the proposed method is experimental verified by comparing with other existing schemes.