Abstract: Reversible data hiding (RDH) can be used for lossless transmission of remote sensing images′ important target region. Based on the study of existing RDH schemes, it was found that the capacity of single embedment was not sufficient and that the process of auxiliary information required additional lossless binary compression, which cannot meet the effectiveness and real-time requirement of remote sensing image process. The smoothness of non-overlapping subblocks in carrier image was detected with a given threshold. Then RDH was achieved by encoding the differences between the reference pixel and the rest pixels in a smooth block, along with bit substitution. Capacity of a single embedment of the proposed scheme can be more than 500000 bit for a 512×512 pixel gray-scale remote sensing image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve reversible data hiding with the efficient capacity of single embedment, and yet no additional lossless binary compression is required for auxiliary information processing.

Key words: reversible data hiding, remote sensing image, smoothness, bit substitution, embedding capacity, auxiliary information processing