@Article{cmc.2020.05681,
AUTHOR = {Shaowei Weng, Yiyun Liu, Yunqing Shi, Bo Ou, Chunyu Zhang, Cuiping Wang},
TITLE = {A General Framework of Reversible Data Hiding with Controlled Contrast Enhancement},
JOURNAL = {Computers, Materials \& Continua},
VOLUME = {62},
YEAR = {2020},
NUMBER = {1},
PAGES = {157--177},
URL = {http://www.techscience.com/cmc/v62n1/38105},
ISSN = {1546-2226},
ABSTRACT = {This paper proposes a two-step general framework for reversible data hiding
(RDH) schemes with controllable contrast enhancement. The first step aims at preserving
visual perception as much as possible on the basis of achieving high embedding capacity
(EC), while the second step is used for increasing image contrast. In the second step, some
peak-pairs are utilized so that the histogram of pixel values is modified to perform
histogram equalization (HE), which would lead to the image contrast enhancement.
However, for HE, the utilization of some peak-pairs easily leads to over-enhanced image
contrast when a large number of bits are embedded. Therefore, in our proposed framework,
contrast over-enhancement is avoided by controlling the degree of contrast enhancement.
Since the second step can only provide a small amount of data due to controlled contrast
enhancement, the first one helps to achieve a large amount of data without degrading visual
quality. Any RDH method which can achieve high EC while preserve good visual quality,
can be selected for the first step. In fact, Gao et al.’s method is a special case of our
proposed framework. In addition, two simple and commonly-used RDH methods are also
introduced to further demonstrate the generalization of our framework.},
DOI = {10.32604/cmc.2020.05681}
}