Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Using Global Compression of Zero-Valued High Bit-Planes and Block Rearrangement
Ye Yao, Ke Wang, Qi Chang, Shaowei Weng
Abstract
Recently, reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) has received widespread attention from researchers. To embed high payload into encrypted images while maintaining sufficient security, a novel RDHEI algorithm in combination with consecutive zero-valued high bit-planes compression, bit-plane swapping as well as block rearrangement is proposed in this article. The proposed method is the first work to compress global zero-valued high bit-planes in a block-wise manner and adaptively allocate different Huffman indicators based on the occurrence frequency of zero-valued bit-planes so that a higher embedded payload is greatly provided. Unlike existing RDHEI methods embedded with unencrypted auxiliary information, resulting in low security, the bit-plane swapping and block rearrangement are subtly designed to cluster together all embeddable bit-planes, which enables most auxiliary information to be encrypted, largely enhancing the security and facilitating data embedding and data extraction. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms some state-of-the-art RDHEI methods in terms of security and payload. The average payload of the proposed method for two publicly-used datasets including BOSSbase and BOWS-2, are 3.793 bpp and 3.705 bpp, respectively.