Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Image using Checkerboard Pattern based Pixel Inversion

Abstract

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is a widely studied domain due to its applications in cloud computing and in the transmission of the medical images. A new block-wise RDH scheme in encrypted images that uses a checkerboard patternbased pixel selection and pixel inversion technique is introduced in this paper. The use of a checkerboard pattern to classify the pixels into two classes (black pixels and white pixels) and the inversion process on the pixels during data hiding ensures the exact recovery of the image in most of the cases. The extraction of the secret data and the original image recovery is possible by analyzing the correlation between pixels within the decrypted image blocks. A new smoothness measure is introduced in this paper which considers all the 3 $\times$ 3 pixels in the overlapping windows of an image block. The new measure introduced in this paper along with the checkerboard pattern-based pixel inversion ensures a low bit error rate. The results claim that the new scheme performs well as compared to the existing techniques. Index Terms–Reversible data hiding, Image encryption, Image recovery, Smoothness measure.