A New High Capacity Separable Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Based on Block Selection and Block-Level Encryption

Yaomin Wang,Wenguang He,Zhanchuan Cai

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2957143

Abstract

Reversible data hiding in encrypted image (RDHEI) is a technology that can simultaneously implement privacy protection and reversible information hiding. For RDHEI, the main problem is the conflict between embedding capacity and real reversibility. In this paper, to solve such a conflict, a new block-level image encryption method is proposed to fulfill privacy protection while preserving the spatial correlation of pixels inside pixel block. On this basis, a new reversible data hiding method based on block selection is also proposed. Specifically, pixel blocks are classified into embeddable block (EB) and non-embeddable block (NEB). Then, additional data is embedded into only EBs and the position file locating EB is also embedded using a new self-embedding method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method not only achieves high embedding capacity, but also guarantees lossless data extraction and perfect image recovery.

Highlights

Data hiding is a technique that embeds additional data into a cover medium without adding additional storage space [1], [2] and it is widely used in information security applications such as copyright protection, information authentication and access control [3], [4]
PROPOSED METHOD Following the principle of embedding one additional bit into a pixel block by flipping the three least significant bits (LSBs) of half of pixels, the embedding capacity depends on the smallest block size such that the hidden bit can be correctly extracted from every pixel block
We propose to only embed additional data into pixel block where the hidden bit can be correctly extracted

Summary

Introduction

Data hiding is a technique that embeds additional data into a cover medium without adding additional storage space [1], [2] and it is widely used in information security applications such as copyright protection, information authentication and access control [3], [4]. Traditional data hiding technology would cause certain distortion to the cover medium [5], [6]. Even a slight distortion is unacceptable in some special scenarios such as military, medical and law [7]. RDH is a technique to embed additional data into a cover medium and the cover medium can be restored after data extraction [8], [9]. Many RDH methods have been proposed [8]–[28] and they are mainly classified into three categories [15], [29]: histogram shifting (HS) based [8], [9], [13]–[19]; lossless

Methods

Results

Conclusion