Secure reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on adaptive Huffman coding and pixel rearrangement

Abstract

With the development of cloud computing and the demand for privacy protection, reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI), which is a technology that embeds secret data in an encrypted image and can ensure error-free extraction of embedded data and lossless recovery of original images, has received widespread attention in recent years. In this paper, an high-capacity and secure RDHEI method is proposed. First, the pixel value of the original image is predicted. Using the properties of the Laplace distribution, the prediction errors are divided into two types of labels. Adaptive Huffman-encoded labeling is performed on these two labels, respectively. Pixel rearrangement is then used to reserve space where additional data can be embedded. Due to the reversibility of Huffman encoding and decoding, the receiver can achieve separable secret information extraction and lossless recovery of the original image. Experimental results show that compared with several existing methods, our method can achieve higher embedding capacity and good security, not only the invisibility of the image content, but also the undetectability of the secret information.