An adaptive pixel mapping based approach for reversible data hiding in encrypted images

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is a widely studied research domain due to the extensive applications in medical image transmission, military image transmission, and cloud computing. In this paper, we propose a novel RDH scheme in encrypted images which is having a high embedding rate without affecting the bit error rate. To perform data hiding, all the non-overlapping pixel sub-arrays from the encrypted image will be considered in a predefined order, and one-bit from the secret message can be hidden in each of the pixel sub-arrays through a controlled pixel mapping technique. The pixels in a selected sub-array P will be split into two groups: odd pixels and even pixels according to the parity of the index of the pixels. All the even pixels will be replaced by a new pixel value based on a predefined mapping function to hide a secret bit 1. To embed bit-value 0, no need to do any modifications in the pixel sub-array P . A new correlation measure between adjacent pixels is introduced in this manuscript to extract the secret message bit and to restore the original image. All the simulations of the proposed scheme are done on the standard images from USC-SIPI image dataset. The results show that the proposed scheme achieved a very good embedding rate without affecting the bit error rate or image recoverability. • A reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted image that uses an adaptive pixel mapping function on the selected pixels is introduced. • The proposed framework can use any secure image encryption and/or decryption process and the proposed reversible data hiding process is independent of the image encryption and/or decryption process. • The proposed scheme ensures a better embedding rate without compromising the bit error rate. • The security analysis on the proposed scheme claims that the new scheme does not alter the image encryption efficiency parameters such as entropy and histogram.