A ROI-based reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted medical images

Abstract

A novel ROI-based reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted medical images is proposed. Firstly, a content owner partitions an original medical image into the region of interest (ROI) and the region of noninterest (RONI), and then encrypts the image using an encryption key. A data-hider concatenates the least significant bits (LSB) of the encrypted ROI and Electronic Patient Record (EPR), and then embeds the concatenated data into the encrypted image by LSB substitution algorithm. With the encrypted medical image containing the embedded data, the receiver can extract the embedded data with the data-hiding key; if the receiver has the encryption key, a medical image similar to the original image can be obtained by directly decrypting the encrypted medical image; if the receiver has both the data-hiding key and the encryption key, the embedded data can be extracted without any error and ROI can be losslessly recovered after extracting the embedded data.