A Recursive Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Method With a Very High Payload

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) can be used as an effective technique to embed additional data directly in the encrypted domain and therefore, without any invasion to privacy. In this way, RDHEI is especially useful for labeling encrypted images in cloud storage. In this paper, we propose a new method of data hiding in encrypted images, which is fully reversible and has a very high payload. All the bit-planes of an image are processed recursively, from the most significant one to the least significant by combining error prediction, reversible adaptation, encryption and embedding. For pixel prediction, the Median Edge Detector, also called LOCO-I and known to be efficient in JPEG-LS compression standard, is used for each bit-plane. Moreover, conversely to current state-of-the-art methods, in our proposed method, there is no pre-processing step to correct incorrectly predicted pixels and no flags to highlight them. Indeed, a reversible adaptation of the bit-planes is performed in order to make it possible to detect and correct all incorrectly predicted pixels during the decoding step. Thanks to the high correlation between pixels in the clear domain, a large part of the bits of an image can be substituted by bits of a secret message. Our experiments show that we can generally embed bits of the secret message until the fourth most-significant bit-plane of an image, this allows us to have an average payload value of 2.4586 bpp.

Automated summary

The proposed method in this study introduces a new technique for reversible data hiding in encrypted images with high payload, involving recursive processing of all bit-planes in the image, prediction errors, reversible adaptation, encryption, and embedding without the need for preprocessing steps.