A reversible data hiding method by histogram shifting in high quality medical images

Enormous demands for recognizing complicated anatomical structures in medical images have been demanded on high quality of medical image such as each pixel expressed by 16-bit depth. Now, most of data hiding algorithms are still applied in 8-bit depth medical images. We proposed a histogram shifting method for image reversible data hiding testing on high bit depth medical images. Among image local block pixels, we exploit the high correlation for smooth surface of anatomical structure in medical images. Thus, we apply a different value for each block of pixels to produce a difference histogram to embed secret bits. During data embedding stage, the image blocks are divided into two categories due to two corresponding embedding strategies. Via an inverse histogram shifting mechanism, the original image will be accurately recovered after the hidden data extraction. Due to requirements of medical images for data hiding, we proposed six criteria: (I) well-suited for high quality medical images, (2) without salt-and-pepper, (3) applicable to medical image with smooth surface, (4) well-suited sparse histogram of intensity levels, (5) free location map, (6) ability of adjusting data embedding capacity, PSNR and Inter-Slice PSNR. We proposed a data hiding methods satisfying above 6 criteria. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.