In the letter, we propose an improved histogram shifting (HS) based reversible data hiding scheme for small payload embedding. Conventional HS based schemes are not suitable for low capacity embedding with relatively large distortion due to the inflexible side information selection. From an analysis of the whole HS process, we develop a rate-distortion model and provide an optimal adaptive searching approach for side information selection according to the given payload. Experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme in terms of performance curve for low payload embedding.

Robustness and invisibility are two contrary constraints for robust invisible watermarking. Instead of the conventional strategy with human visual system (HVS) model, this paper presents a content-adaptive approach to further optimize the constraint between them. To reach this target, the entropy-based and integrated HVS (IHVS) based measures are constructed so as to adaptively choose the suitable components for watermark insertion and detection. Such a kind of scheme potentially gives rise to synchronization problem between the encoder and decoder under the framework of blind watermarking, which is then solved by incorporating the repeat-accumulate (RA) code with erasure and error correction. Moreover, a new hidden Markov model (HMM) based detector in wavelet domain is introduced to reduce the computation complexity and is further developed into a posterior one to avoid the transmission of HMM parameters with only a little sacrifice of detection performance. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain considerable improvement in robustness performance with the same distortion as the traditional one.