An adaptive method for prevention of overflow in reversible data hiding schemes

In reversible data hiding (RDH) schemes for images, the overflow/underflow problem must be considered to ensure reversibility. Existing techniques to avoid this problem seem to be sensitive to the working principle of a particular RDH scheme, and their performance may be adequate only when the number of problematic pixels, i.e., pixels at risk of overflow, is small or moderate compared to the total number of pixels in the image. However, when the number of problematic pixels is significantly large, the size of the recovery information needed to restore the original image increases significantly, and the performance of the RDH implementation could be affected. This paper presents an adaptive method for generating a flag array of recovery information to avoid the overflow problem. The results show that the proposed method is suitable for images with a high rate of problematic pixels since it produces much smaller recovery information streams than existing techniques. Additionally, the proposed technique allows exploiting problematic pixels during the embedding stage, increasing the effective capacity. Furthermore, the proposed method is tested with different RDH schemes and different pixel modification amplitudes, and it can preserve the structural quality of the processed images.