Reversible data hiding based on local histogram shifting with multilayer embedding

• We use the two neighboring points of the peak point to embed the secret data.
• We improve the histogram of embedded cover image to ensure security of secret data.
• The multilayer embedding of pyramid structure is adopted to increase the capacity.
• Our proposed method has a higher embedding capacity with lower distortion.

In this paper, we present a new reversible data hiding method based on histogram shifting using localization. Our proposed method selects peak point as the reference point, then uses the two neighboring points of the peak point to achieve secret data embedding based on histogram shifting and the peak point keeps unchanged. In the extraction end, we no longer need the key information about the peak point, we can directly find the peak point from the histogram to extract the secret data. We also exploit the localization to make the histogram of embedded cover image become almost the same as the histogram of the original cover image. The embedding capacity is also increased rapidly by the localization with multilayer embedding. Experimental results show that our proposed method is effective and superior.