Secure reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on adaptive prediction-error labeling

Abstract

Reversible data hiding ensures that the legitimate recipient can completely recover the original image and additional data. However, in order to hide the original image content, the content-owner might encrypt the image locally first. Thus reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) has attracted wide attention, which can be used for cloud storage and privacy protection. In this paper, a high-capacity and secure RDHEI method based on adaptive prediction-error labeling (APL) is proposed, which takes advantage of the Laplacian-like distribution of prediction errors. To increase the reserved room before encryption, we present two approaches that combine APL and encryption. One pessimistically exposes the shuffled labels in encrypted images, while the other optimistically performs the encryption on the labels. Dependent of both approaches, the original image and additional data can be completely and separately recovered if the recipient has the secret key. More importantly, security of RDHEI is emphasized, not only the invisibility of image content, but also the undetectability of additional data. Experimental results show that our method is able to achieve higher embedding capacity and relevant security compared with prior arts.