Open Access

ARTICLE

Reversible Data Hiding with Contrast Enhancement Using Bi-histogram Shifting and Image Adjustment for Color Images

by Goma Tshivetta Christian Fersein Jorvialom^1,2, Lord Amoah^1,2,*

1 Engineering Research Center of Digital Forensics, Ministry of Education, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China
2 School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

* Corresponding Author: Lord Amoah. Email:

Journal of Quantum Computing 2022, 4(3), 183-197. https://doi.org/10.32604/jqc.2022.039913

Received 24 February 2023; Accepted 07 April 2023; Issue published 03 July 2023

Abstract

Prior versions of reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement (RDHCE) algorithms strongly focused on enhancing the contrast of grayscale images. However, RDHCE has recently witnessed a rise in contrast enhancement algorithms concentrating on color images. This paper implies a method for color images that uses the RGB (red, green, and blue) color model and is based on bi-histogram shifting and image adjustment. Bi-histogram shifting is used to embed data and image adjustment to achieve contrast enhancement by adjusting the images resulting from each channel of the color images before combining them to generate the final enhanced image. Images are first divided into three channels—R, G, and B—and the Max, Med, and Min channels are then determined from these. Before histogram shifting, some calculations are done to determine how many iterations there will be for each channel. The images are adjusted to improve visual quality in the enhanced images after data has been embedded in each channel. The experimental results show that the enhanced images produced by the proposed method are qualitatively and aesthetically superior to those produced by some earlier methods, and their quality was assessed using PSNR, SSIM, RCE, RMBE, and CIEDE2000. The embedding rate obtained by the suggested method is acceptable.

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Keywords

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