Generalized PVO-K Embedding Technique for Reversible Data Hiding

Recently, several reversible information hiding methods based PVO (pixel value ordering) techniques have been proposed, in these methods, secret data always are embedded in pixels with largest or smallest value in the block. In order to make use of the block with multiple largest-valued (or smallest-valued) pixels, a PVO-K method was proposed, which treats K largest-valued (or smallest-valued) pixels as a unit to embed secret data, and all K pixels are modified together to embed one bit of information. In this paper, we propose a generalized PVO-K method (GePVO-K) that takes full advantage of these pixels with largest or smallest values by embedding K bits of secret data into the K pixels. As a result, the GePVO-K method has greater embedding capacity than the PVO-K method. The superiority of the GePVO-K scheme was verified by the experimental results.