A New Reversible Watermarking Method Based on Histogram Shifting

This paper proposes a new histogram shifting-based reversible watermarking method. In contrast to other almost methods that need to use simultaneously the watermarked image and some image-dependent side information to restore the watermark and the original image, our method can do above restorations without any auxiliary information. Such methods are called free from side information. Our solution is combining LSB-embedding and histogram shifting (HS). The original image is parted into two domains: the first one, consisting of a few pixels, is used for hiding auxiliary information by LSB-inserting, while the second one, comprising the other pixels is used for embedding the watermark by histogram shifting. In comparison to a few known free from side information methods, our method has higher embedding capacity and lower computational complexity. In addition, our solution can easily be used to make almost other histogram shiftingbased reversible watermarking methods become free from side information. 446 Kim Sao Nguyen et al.