A recent survey of reversible watermarking techniques

The art of secretly hiding and communicating information has gained immense importance in the last two decades due to the advances in generation, storage, and communication technology of digital content. Watermarking is one of the promising solutions for tamper detection and protection of digital content. However, watermarking can cause damage to the sensitive information present in the cover work. Therefore, at the receiving end, the exact recovery of cover work may not be possible. Additionally, there exist certain applications that may not tolerate even small distortions in cover work prior to the downstream processing. In such applications, reversible watermarking instead of conventional watermarking is employed. Reversible watermarking of digital content allows full extraction of the watermark along with the complete restoration of the cover work. For the last few years, reversible watermarking techniques are gaining popularity because of its increasing applications in some important and sensitive areas, i.e., military communication, healthcare, and law-enforcement. Due to the rapid evolution of reversible watermarking techniques, a latest review of recent research in this field is highly desirable. In this survey, the performances of different reversible watermarking schemes are discussed on the basis of various characteristics of watermarking. However, the major focus of this survey is on prediction-error expansion based reversible watermarking techniques, whereby the secret information is hidden in the prediction domain through error expansion. Comparison of the different reversible watermarking techniques is provided in tabular form, and an analysis is carried out. Additionally, experimental comparison of some of the recent reversible watermarking techniques, both in terms of watermarking properties and computational time, is provided on a dataset of 300 images. Future directions are also provided for this potentially important field of watermarking.