Prediction-based reversible data hiding using the difference of neighboring pixels

A multilevel histogram-modification mechanism was proposed by Zhao et al. in 2011 to achieve the high hiding capacity. However, the pixel was modified regardless of whether it was embeddable, which led to a serious distortion problem. In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding scheme that determines whether the pixel is embeddable or not by calculating the absolute difference of its neighboring pixels. If the absolute difference is higher than a predetermined threshold, the pixel remains unchanged to achieve high image quality. Experimental results and performance comparisons show that the proposed method has better visual quality and higher hiding capacity than the recently proposed methods.