A Universal Framework to Construct a Huffman-Code-Mapping-based Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for JPEG Images
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Huffman code mapping (HCM) is a recent technique for reversible data hiding (RDH) in JPEG images. The existing HCM-based RDH schemes cause neither file-size increment nor visual distortion for the marked JPEG image, which is the superiority compared to the RDH schemes that use other techniques, such as histogram shifting (HS). However, the embedding capacity achieved by the HCM-based RDH schemes is much lower than the HS-based RDH schemes. Moreover, the existing HCM-based schemes are only applicable to the JPEG images coded with the default Huffman table. In this paper, we propose a universal framework to design the HCM-based RDH scheme. Under this framework, the key issue of HCM-based schemes, i.e., construct the optimal code mapping relationship, is converted to solve a combinatorial optimization problem. The high embedding capacity can be achieved with a slight increase in the file-size of the marked JPEG image. In addition, the problem of applicability is also solved by customizing the Huffman table. As a realization, we construct a new HCM-based scheme by employing the genetic algorithm to search the nearly optimal solution. Experiments show that the performance on the file-size preservation, visual quality, and computational complexity is superior to recent HS-based RDH schemes under the identical payload.
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