High-capacity reversible data hiding by maximum-span pairing

In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding method for ordered dithered halftone images. To achieve reversibility and high capacity, the proposed method decomposes an ordered dithered halftone into a maximal number of subimage pairs with the same characteristic, and then hides data with a subimage-swapping operation, which converts a subimage pair into a subimage pair with opposite characteristic. Besides, this method maintains good visual quality by exchanging neighboring pixels instead of flipping individual pixels. Experimental results show that this method has the highest capacity among the existing reversible data hiding methods. A reversible authentication watermarking system is also proposed using this reversible watermarking method and it shows better visual quality compared to an existing method.