Separable Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted AMBTC Images Using Hamming Code

Abstract

Data hiding is a field widely used in copyright, annotation, and secret communication for digital content, and has been continuously studied for more than 20 years. In general, data hiding uses the original image as a cover image to hide data, but recently, the research area has expanded to research on improving the security and privacy protection of image contents by encrypting the image. This research is called separable reversible data hiding in an encrypted image (SRDH-EI). In this paper, we proposed a more efficient SRDH-EI method based on AMBTC. AMBTC can guarantee very good network transmission efficiency for applications that do not require a particularly high image quality because the compression time is short and calculation is simple compared to other existing compression methods. The SRDH-EI method presented here divides AMBTC into non-overlapping 4×4 blocks and then performs image encryption on them. Thereafter, data can be hidden using a Hamming code for each block. The proposed method has an advantage in that the quality of the cover image and the hiding capacity can be adjusted by appropriately using the value T of the difference between the two quantization levels. The experimental results proved the efficiency and superiority of our proposed model.