High Capacity Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Image Based on Adaptive MSB Prediction

Abstract

Reversible data hiding in encrypted image (RDHEI) is a technique that can be adopted by cloud sever to embed additional data into the encrypted image with no permanent distortion. For RDHEI, it remains a challenging task to improve the embedding capacity under the premise of real reversibility. In this paper, a novel RDHEI method based on adaptive most significant bit (MSB) prediction is proposed. The cover image is first encrypted in block-wise manner such that the correlation of pixels within block is preserved. Next, all blocks are permuted to fulfill the final encryption. During data embedding, the upper-left pixel within block is used to predict others such that the embedding room is vacated. Then, available blocks are selected and all blocks are rearranged so as to ensure reversibility. By fully exploiting the correlation of pixels within block via adaptive MSB prediction, the proposed method successes to achieve desirable improvement in capacity. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous methods. Moreover, real reversibility and real separability are also guaranteed. In a word, the proposed method is a practical method that can be adopted by cloud storage.