A Multi-Directional Pixel-Swapping Approach (MPSA) for Entropy-Retained Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images

Abstract

Reversible data hiding (RDH), a promising data-hiding technique, is widely examined in domains such as medical image transmission, satellite image transmission, crime investigation, cloud computing, etc. None of the existing RDH schemes addresses a solution from a real-time aspect. A good compromise between the information embedding rate and computational time makes the scheme suitable for real-time applications. As a solution, we propose a novel RDH scheme that recovers the original image by retaining its quality and extracting the hidden data. Here, the cover image gets encrypted using a stream cipher and is partitioned into non-overlapping blocks. Secret information is inserted into the encrypted blocks of the cover image via a controlled local pixel-swapping approach to achieve a comparatively good payload. The new scheme MPSA allows the data hider to hide two bits in every encrypted block. The existing reversible data-hiding schemes modify the encrypted image pixels leading to a compromise in image security. However, the proposed work complements the support of encrypted image security by maintaining the same entropy of the encrypted image in spite of hiding the data. Experimental results illustrate the competency of the proposed work accounting for various parameters, including embedding rate and computational time.

Separable Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images for Remote Sensing Images

“…From the above data, it can be seen that in the two stages of encryption and data embedding, the entropy value tended to be the entropy value of the noisy image and remained almost unchanged, which reflects that there was no increase in the information amount of the cover image during the transmission process, which is conducive to transmission security. This feature was also mentioned in works [12,13], which studied the stable entropy of encrypted images, reflecting the security of the algorithm. Therefore, the proposed algorithm also possesses this property and security.…”

“…The joint algorithms must perform data extraction and cover decryption according to the designed order. To achieve true reversibility and separability, the two operations must be completed without errors, such as in [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]27,36], etc. Separable algorithms have more flexibility.…”