Efficient separable reversible data hiding algorithm for compressed 3D mesh models

• No underflow and overflow problem. • Not affected by vertex reordering attack. • Breadth first traversal for 3D mesh model. A typical problem examined in most of the earlier reversible data hiding methods is the vast amount of information to be transmitted towards the recipient end, which significantly limits the applicability of these methods. Hence, the need of data compression is required before transmission. An efficient reversible data hiding algorithm for 3D mesh models in the compressed domain is proposed to ensure secret message privacy and security. The main contribution of proposed algorithm is to hide secret message in 3D mesh model in such a way that mesh vertices and its corresponding topology remained as it is while allowing the receiver to correctly extract secret message and perfectly reconstruct the cover 3D mesh model in a reversible manner. For traversing 3D mesh vertices, a novel mesh traversal algorithm is proposed where the traversal order of stego-mesh is not affected by vertex reordering attack because it is based on the computation of the shortest distance between neighbor vertices regardless of their reference indexes. Experimental study reveals that the proposed method has more embedding rate with comparing image quality than the existing methods. The average PSNR value is 96.40 dB for an embedding rate of 6.94 bits per vertex(bpv) for all test mesh models, demonstrating that the method can give good quality stego mesh models even at high payload also.