Adaptive reversible data hiding for JPEG images with multiple two-dimensional histograms

Joint photographic experts group (JPEG) can provide good quality with small file size but also eliminate extensively the redundancies of images. Therefore, hiding data into JPEG images in terms of maintaining high visual quality at small file sizes has been a great challenge for researchers. In this paper, an adaptive reversible data hiding method for JPEG images containing multiple two-dimensional (2D) histograms is proposed. Adaptability is mainly reflected in three aspects. The first one is to preferentially select sharper histograms for data embedding after $K$ histograms are established by constructing the $k$th ($k\in \{1,2,\dots ,K\}$) histogram using the $k$th non-zero alternating current (AC) coefficient of all the quantized discrete cosine transform blocks. On the other hand, to fully exploit the strong correlation between coefficients of one histogram, the smoothness of each coefficient is estimated by a block smoothness estimator so that a sharply-distributed 2D-histogram is constructed by combining two coefficients with similar smoothness into a pair. The pair corresponding to low complexity is selected priorly for data embedding, leading to high embedding performance while maintaining low file size. Besides, we design multiple embedding strategies to adaptively select the embedding strategy for each 2D histogram. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve higher rate–distortion performance which maintaining lower file storage space, compared with previous studies.     

Multitone reconstruction visual cryptography based on phase periodicity

The current no-computation grayscale image visual cryptography (VC) can only achieve halftone reconstruction but cannot truly achieve multitone. To solve this problem, we propose the concept of phase periodicity of the $\lambda /2$ retarder film and calculate the optical axis angle set with phase periodicity. According to the phase periodicity, we propose a $\lambda /2$ retarder film phase periodicity visual cryptography (RPP-VC). In RPP-VC, the secret pixels are encoded as the optical axis angles of $n$ $\lambda /2$ retarder films and distributed to $n$ shares. The decoding process does not require computation. The reconstructed image has no pixel expansion and can reach up to 23 tones. The quality of the reconstructed images has been greatly improved and the evaluation indicators of perceived quality are nearly doubled compared with other grayscale image VC schemes. The experimental results verify the feasibility of RPP-VC.