A Survey on Reversible Data Hiding for Uncompressed Images

Reversible data hiding (RDH) has developed various theories and algorithms since the early 1990s. The existing works involve a large amount of specialized knowledge, making it difficult for researchers, especially primary learners, to have a good grounding in the basic ideas. In this survey, we will review the mainstream RDH algorithms in uncompressed images and analyze their unique features to provide readers with an introduction to basic topics in RDH. We analyze the most effective RDH frameworks and their common extensions. The classic techniques, including lossless compression-based RDH, difference expansion, integer transform, histogram shifting, prediction-error expansion (PEE), and their extensions, will be reviewed first. Then, three currently popular investigated schemes, i.e., multiple histograms modification, pairwise PEE, and pixel-value-ordering, are presented in detail. Four aspects of these mainstream techniques are reviewed and analyzed, including the evolution of embedding frameworks, detailed technological features, extensions, and the current state of the art. Furthermore, we look forward the possible future research based on early-age motivations.