  This paper presents a novel reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithm for
gray-scaled images, in which the prediction-error of prediction error (PPE) of
a pixel is used to carry the secret data. In the proposed method, the pixels to
be embedded are firstly predicted with their neighboring pixels to obtain the
corresponding prediction errors (PEs). Then, by exploiting the PEs of the
neighboring pixels, the prediction of the PEs of the pixels can be determined.
And, a sorting technique based on the local complexity of a pixel is used to
collect the PPEs to generate an ordered PPE sequence so that, smaller PPEs will
be processed first for data embedding. By reversibly shifting the PPE histogram
(PPEH) with optimized parameters, the pixels corresponding to the altered PPEH
bins can be finally modified to carry the secret data. Experimental results
have implied that the proposed method can benefit from the prediction procedure
of the PEs, sorting technique as well as parameters selection, and therefore
outperform some state-of-the-art works in terms of payload-distortion
performance when applied to different images.
