Encrypted separable reversible watermarking with authentication and error correction

Abstract

Reversible Watermarking (RW) in encrypted images helps to reconstruct the original content and embedded data without distortion while protecting the owner’s privacy. The security and integrity of embedded data is very much demanding. In this paper, an efficient RW method is proposed that recovers the embedded data from the marked encrypted color palette images in the presence of attacks. In this method, embeddable color-triples are constructed by employing color partitioning. Next, the cryptographic SHA-256 hash and Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem (BCH) are applied over the secret information to ensure the authenticity and integrity. The hash authenticated secret data is embedded into the encrypted color palette image. The secret data is extracted using the separable color partitioning method and authenticated with cryptographic hash function. The proposed method has higher embedding capacity when compared to other relative schemes. The BCH codes helps to recover the secret data and cover image in the presence of noise and attacks.