A High-Capacity Separable Reversible Method for Hiding Multiple Messages in Encrypted Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high-capacity, separable reversible data hiding scheme for encrypted images that allows multiple messages to be embedded and extracted securely without compromising the original image quality.

Contribution

It presents a novel method enabling multiple message embedding in encrypted images with perfect recovery and high capacity, while maintaining data security and image integrity.

Findings

High embedding capacity achieved

Multiple messages can be independently extracted

Original image can be perfectly reconstructed

Abstract

This work proposes a high-capacity scheme for separable reversible data hiding in encrypted images. At the sender side, the original uncompressed image is encrypted using an encryption key. One or several data hiders use the MSB of some image pixels to hide additional data. Given the encrypted image containing this additional data, with only one of those data hiding keys, the receiver can extract the corresponding embedded data, although the image content will remain inaccessible. With all of the embedding keys, the receiver can extract all of the embedded data. Finally, with the encryption key, the receiver can decrypt the received data and reconstruct the original image perfectly\ignore{ without the data embedding key(s) }by exploiting the spatial correlation of natural images. Based on the proposed method a receiver could recover the original image perfectly even when it does not have the data embedding key(s) and the embedding rate is high.