Deep Prediction and Efficient 3D Mapping of Color Images for Reversible Data Hiding

In the reversible data hiding (RDH) community, both prediction and mapping strategies are vital for reducing distortion. With high prediction performance, small prediction errors can be generated to reduce the embedding distortion. Besides, the efficient mapping strategy can improve the practicality. In this paper, we propose a new RDH method for color images by using convolution neural networks (CNNs) for prediction and an efficient 3D mapping strategy for embedding. At first, each color image is elaborately divided into three isolated image sets so that the proposed deep prediction network (DPN) can exploit more neighboring pixels in the current channel and the correlation between three channels. Then, an efficient 3D mapping strategy is luminously designed by using the symmetry of the 3D prediction error histogram (PEH). The symmetry of 3D PEH has been analyzed in statistical and experimental ways. Based on the proposed deep prediction network and efficient 3D mapping strategy (DPEM), we construct an efficient RDH method for color images. The performance of the proposed DPN is evaluated by comparing it with several predictors on different image datasets. The embedding performance has been demonstrated by hiding information in color images, e.g., the average PSNR value of the Kodak dataset is 63.63 dB with an embedding capacity of 50,000 bits. Furthermore, the experimental results on the ImageNet and PASCAL VOC2012 datasets have shown the proposed RDH method is superior to several state-of-the-art RDH methods. With the introduction of deep learning, the development of the RDH method for color images can be promoted. © 2025 IEEE.