An Adaptive Multi-level Block-wise Encryption based Reversible Data Hiding Scheme

Abstract

The design and development of reversible data hiding algorithms got a lot of consideration in recent years because of its wide applicability in medical image transmission and cloud computing. In this paper, we propose a new reversible data hiding scheme though a block-wise multi-level image encryption process to hide lengthy secret messages in an image. In the proposed technique, the data hider will use two additional encryption keys K <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> and K <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> for reversible data hiding purpose other than the image encryption key K. During the process of data hiding, an encrypted image will be taken as the input and produces a final modified encrypted image with hidden data. For the extraction of data and recovery of image, the receiver needs the image decryption key K and the additional decryption keys K <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> and K <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> . The naturalness property of the image blocks is analyzed to recover the image blocks through a multi-level decryption process. The standard images from the USC-SIPI dataset controlled by the University of Southern California are used to conduct the experimental study.