Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Based on an Adaptive Recognition Strategy for Blocks

As the rapid development of third-party storage and homomorphic encryption have profoundly stimulated the desire for secure communication, reversible data hiding in encrypted images has received widespread attention, since it allows lossless data conveying and perfect image recovery. In order to obtain secure reversible data hiding with high embedding capacity, a novel block embedding method is proposed, based on an adaptive recognition strategy for combined blocks in the binary image, with which the adjacent identical blocks can be integrated into a combination to reserve more spare bits for data accommodation. Furthermore, a fully reversible data hiding method for grayscale images in the encryption domain is designed. The secret data is hidden into lower bit-planes of the image while the original bits of those embedded lower pixels are recorded into the vacated space of higher bit-planes. The original image can be reconstructed flawlessly as well as the secret data being extracted without errors. To reinforce security, the original image and the secret data are encrypted and scrambled based on sequences generated with the high-dimension chaotic system. Due to its high sensitivity of initial values, the performance such as security and robustness is guaranteed. By comparing the PSNR value of the marked decrypted image and evaluating the quality of the extracted secret image, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain higher embedding capacity, achieving 0.2700–0.3924 bpp increment over the state-of-the-art methods, and recover the marked decrypted image with high visual symmetry/quality, and efficiently resist against potential attacks, such as the histogram analysis, differential, brute-force, JPEG attacks, and so on.