Reversible Data Hiding in Color Image with Grayscale Invariance using Sorting

Most reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithms for color images directly embed secret information in the luminance channel. As a result, the grayscale version of the color image is usually distorted. Since many color image processing algorithms work on the grayscale version, their performance on marked color images may get seriously impacted. Therefore, RD H with grayscale invariance (RDH-GI) is advanced to eliminate such shortcomings and has received great attention thereafter. However, their performance is still far from satisfactory. This paper presents a novel RDH-GI method by exploiting the pixel clustering technique to segment host pixels into different complexity levels. Data embedding tends to take place in less complex regions, and thus image distortion is reduced while maintaining grayscale invariance. Experiments prove the effectiveness of the proposed work.