Improving the Reversible LSB Matching Scheme Based on the Likelihood Re-Encoding Strategy

In 2018, Tseng et al. proposed a dual-image reversible embedding method based on the modified Least Significant Bit matching (LSB matching) method. This method improved on the dual-image LSB matching method proposed by Lu et al. In Lu et al.’s scheme, there are seven situations that cannot be restored and need to be modified. Furthermore, the scheme uses two pixels to conceal four secret bits. The maximum modification of each pixel, in Lu et al.’s scheme, is two. To decrease the modification, Tseng et al. use one pixel to embed two secret bits and allow the maximum modification to decrease from two to one such that the image quality can be improved. This study enhances Tseng et al.’s method by re-encoding the modified rule table based on the probability of each hiding combination. The scheme analyzes the frequency occurrence of each combination and sets the lowest modified codes to the highest frequency case to significantly reduce the amount of modification. Experimental results show that better image quality is obtained using our method under the same amount of hiding payload.