Visible watermark removal scheme based on reversible data hiding and image inpainting

In this paper, we propose two schemes for visible-watermark removal and reversible image recovery. In the first scheme, we consider the scenario for the image generated by a specific visible (not completely reversible) watermarking algorithm Chen et al. (2017). A run-length coding based method is utilized to compress the difference between the preliminary recovered image and original image. After embedding the difference information invisibly and reversibly, the final embedded image can be exactly recovered to its original version after visible-watermark removal, which avoids the problem of overflow and underflow in Chen et al. (2017). In the second scheme, the scenario of visible-watermark removal for the image generated by any visible watermarking algorithms (no matter the sender and the receiver know the algorithms or not) is considered. The scheme can perfectly remove the embedded visible watermark and can also exactly recover original image with the assist of image inpainting technique. In addition, for both two proposed schemes, the invalid user without the knowledge of secret key cannot achieve reversible recovery for original image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our schemes.