A Reversible Data Hiding Method in Compressible Encrypted Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reversible data hiding method for compressible encrypted images that enables embedding data and compression simultaneously, applicable in both encrypted and decrypted domains, with high efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel two-domain data hiding approach in encrypted images that supports compression with standard image coding methods.

Findings

High compression efficiency with JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000

Effective data hiding capacity and image quality

Applicable to both encrypted and plain images

Abstract

We propose a reversible data hiding (RDH) method in compressible encrypted images called the encryption-then-compression (EtC) images. The proposed method allows us to not only embed a payload in encrypted images but also compress the encrypted images containing the payload. In addition, the proposed RDH method can be applied to both plain images and encrypted ones, and the payload can be extracted flexibly in the encrypted domain or from the decrypted images. Various RDH methods have been studied in the encrypted domain, but they are not considered to be two-domain data hiding, and the resultant images cannot be compressed by using image coding standards, such as JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000. In our experiment, the proposed method shows high performance in terms of lossless compression efficiency by using JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000, data hiding capacity, and marked image quality.