Capacity maximization for reversible data hiding based on dynamic programming approach

Recently, an efficient reversible lossless data hiding algorithm by Ni et al. was presented. Their fast algorithm can recover the original image without any distortion and its PSNR lower bound is higher than that of all existing reversible data hiding algorithms. Instead of selecting the peak-valley pairs in a greedy way, this paper presents a dynamic programming-based reversible data hiding algorithm to determine the most suitable peak-valley pairs such that the embedding capacity object can be maximized. Based on some artificial map images, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm has 9% embedding capacity improvement ratio and has the similar image quality performance when compared to Ni et al.'s algorithm although it has some execution-time degradation. For natural images, the embedding capacity of Ni et al.'s algorithm is very close to the maximal embedding capacity obtained by our proposed algorithm. Furthermore, the comparison between our proposed dynamic programming-based algorithm and the reversible data hiding algorithm by Chang et al. is investigated.