Abstract
Existing reversible data hiding work in encrypted images (RDH-EI) mostly does not attain a good balance among good visual quality, large embedding capacity and high security performance. To address this problem, we design a new reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images by combining median prediction and bit plan cycling-XOR. Our scheme firstly estimates the most significant bit (MSB) of each pixel by considering the median value of its adjacent pixels and generates a prediction error map to mark these pixels whose MSB bits are predicted incorrectly. Subsequently, we divide bit planes of cover image and then implement plane cyclic exclusive OR from least significant bit (LSB) plane to MSB plane. The LSB plane is finally vacated to be free room. Furthermore, the processed image is encrypted by a stream cipher algorithm, and data hider can embed additional data into the LSB plane. Separable operations of data extraction, image decryption and image recovery can be achieved successfully by the receiver. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that compared with existing methods, our scheme can attain a better balance among good visual quality, large embedding capacity and high security performance.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1936213), Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (No. 20ZR1421600) and Research Fund of Guangxi Key Lab of Multi-source Information Mining & Security (No. MIMS21-M-02).
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Fengyong Li designed the proposed algorithm and drafted the article. Hengjie Zhu designed and conducted the subjective experiments and tested the proposed algorithm. Chuan Qin offered useful suggestions and modified the article. All authors read and approved the final article.
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Li, F., Zhu, H. & Qin, C. Reversible data hiding in encrypted images using median prediction and bit plane cycling-XOR. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 6013–6032 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13406-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13406-w