Privacy-preserving reversible data hiding based on quad-tree block encoding and integer wavelet transform

Abstract

Applications on the cloud server have matured, and protecting the privacy of the content owner has attracted more attention. Privacy-Preserving Reversible data hiding (PP-RDH) is an efficient technique for embedding additional data into an encrypted image. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving reversible data hiding scheme using the quad-tree partition and Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) techniques. Our scheme focuses on improving the embedding rate and quality of the recovered image when a 2 × 2-sized, block-based image encryption method is applied to ensure relative higher security. On this basis, the IWT technique transforms the encrypted image, and coefficients in three high frequency subbands are converted into 8-bit binary system. Then, the quad-tree partition technique encodes each 8 × 8-sized coefficient block, since there are many zeroes in the front bit planes. The experimental results indicated that our proposed scheme significantly improved the embedding rate, and guaranteed lossless image recovery and data extraction.