Hybrid Predictor Based Four-Phase Adaptive Reversible Watermarking

Reversible watermarking has gained importance due to increased involvement of digital media in sensitive fields, such as medical and law enforcement. We propose a prediction error expansion-based watermarking scheme that allows embedding reversible watermark in the image with low distortion. Research work proposes four-phase representation of image which allows exploitation of larger prediction context. We have also proposed a hybrid predictor that helps enhance the prediction accuracy. To reduce image distortion at lower capacity payloads, we use sorting of estimated prediction errors through sorting of prediction context variances. For improvement at higher capacity payloads, adaptive embedding is used to determine whether to embed single or two bits in a given prediction error. The results are compared against some state-of-the-art techniques in the field and show promising results.