Stereo image coding with histogram-pair based reversible data hiding

This paper presents a stereo image coding method using reversible data hiding technique so that the right frame can be recovered losslessly and the left frame can be reconstructed with high visual quality. Utilizing the similarity between two frames in a stereo image pair the required size of storage and transmission bandwidth for the stereo image pair can be reduced to 50%. A residual error matrix with a dynamic range of [−255, 255] is obtained by applying a frame-wise disparity algorithm which first shifts the left frame horizontally by a certain amount and then computes its difference to the right frame. Next, thus the generated residual error image with gray levels [0, 255] is obtained losslessly by a proposed labeling scheme. JPEG2000 lossy compression is then applied to the residual error image. The histogram-pair based reversible data hiding scheme is then utilized to embed the JPEG2000 lossy compressed data into the right frame. Compared with the prior art, which uses a block-based disparity estimation algorithm and a location map based reversible data hiding, the proposed method has demonstrated that the stereo image can be reconstructed with higher visual quality and with faster processing speed. Specifically, the experiments have demonstrated that both the PSNR and visual quality of the reconstructed stereo image pair are higher than those achieved by the prior arts.