Quality guided reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement

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Reversible data hiding with contrast enhancement (RDH-CE) enables contrast enhancement of the image and lossless recovery of host image after embedded data extraction. Although the current RDH-CE methods are effective in enhancing carrier images and ensuring reversibility, image quality control is still lacking, which may lead to poor image visualization. In more serious situations, the image detail information may be lost. The peak pair selection mechanism plays an extremely crucial role in image quality enhancement; however, existing work often neglects this. In this paper, we propose an RDH-CE algorithm that pursues high image quality maintenance, aiming to maintain image quality by guiding and controlling the selection of peaks and the direction of histogram shift through quality metrics. Specifically, instead of simply selecting only one pair of peaks at each peak selection stage, our algorithm selects several pairs of peaks that meet the requirements as candidate peak pairs. It then first performs simulated histogram equalization on these candidate peaks, followed by analyzing the situation of the quality metrics generated by each pair of peaks accordingly, and then selects the optimal peaks for the current iteration based on the performance of each pair of candidate peaks to be used in the equalization process. Our selection mechanism also dynamically changes the peak selection strategy based on before-and-after changes in the actual metrics, which can better ensure image quality stability over the iterations. Under the evaluations of a series of image quality metrics, the proposed method can still maintain high quality and visual effect under high iteration and has strong stability for image quality control, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.