Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Based on Reversible Integer Transformation and Quadtree-Based Partition

Sisheng Chen,Chin-Chen Chang

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3029420

Sisheng Chen, Chin-Chen Chang

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.3029420

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Abstract

This paper presents an improved secure reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images based on integer transformation, which does not need using a data hider key to protect the embedded secret data. We first segment the original image into blocks of various sizes based on the quadtree-based image partition. For each block, we reserve $m$ least significant bits (LSBs) of each pixel as embedding room based on the reversible integer transformation. In order to improve the security of the image encryption, we pad the $m$ LSBs of each pixel using the corresponding (8- $m$ ) most significant bits (MSBs) information after the transformation, which protects the security of the encryption key. Then, we encrypt the transformed image with a standard stream cipher. After the image encryption, the data hider embeds the secret data in the $m$ LSBs of the encrypted images through an exclusive or operation. On the receiving side, the receiver can extract the secret data after the image decryption and recover the original image without loss of quality. The security analysis shows that the proposed scheme improves the security weakness of the scheme directly using adaptive integer transformation. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a higher embedding ratio compared with several relevant methods.

Highlights

Data hiding in digital images is an information security technique to hide secret data by modifying the cover images
The first is to analyze the security of the encrypted images, where we demonstrate that the process of pre-processing and data embedding don’t affect the statistical security of encrypted images
This paper proposed an SOK-type reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) scheme using a reversible integer transformation and quad-tree-based image partition, in which we do not need to use a data hiding key to protect the security of the embedded messages

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Data hiding in digital images is an information security technique to hide secret data by modifying the cover images. Scheme [17] transferred the redundant space for data embedding by exchanging the MSBs and LSBs of the pixel values before image encryption They used a coding method to vacate room in the LSBs of pixels in the cipher image blocks. Schemes [27], [28] used the homomorphism of the encryption algorithms to embed the secret data by modifying the cipher pixel values without affecting the decryption These methods can obtain a higher embedding capacity because they don’t consider the quality of the stego-images. We know most RDHEI schemes not matter based on RRBE or VRAE have to pre-process the original image for vacating embedding room before encryption.

RELATED WORKS

REVERSIBLE INTEGER TRANSFORM AND ANALYSIS

IMAGE ENCRYPTION

DATA EXTRACTION AND IMAGE RECOVERY

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

CONCLUSION