General Distortion Metric Based Histogram Shifting for Reversible Data Hiding

In reversible data hiding (RDH) community, researchers often embed bits by shifting prediction-error histogram based on the mean-square error metric (MSEM). This will cause more pixel distortion in the smooth areas. Considering that the human eye is more sensitive to the distortion in the smooth areas, in this letter, we propose a new histogram shifting strategy for RDH by referring to the general distortion metric (GDM). With the GDM, data can be embedded by first modifying those pixels in the texture areas. In both theoretical analysis and experimental testing, we have shown that the use of the proposed GDM-based histogram shifting strategy for RDH can further improve the visual quality of marked images in higher SSIM values by comparing with typical MSEM-based histogram shifting methods.