Secure Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images By Reserving Space In Advance

Abstract

Reversible data hiding with image encryption is a technique, in which a secret data is embedded inside a confidential image in such a way that, at the receiver side, both the image and the data can be extracted without any loss.  All previous methods embed data by reversibly vacating room from the encrypted images, which may be subject to some errors on data extraction and/or image restoration. In this paper, we propose a novel method by reserving room before encryption with a traditional RDH algorithm, and thus it is easy for the data hider to reversibly embed data in the encrypted image. The proposed method can achieve real reversibility, that is, data extraction and image recovery are free of any error. It can be used in situations where both image and data have equal importance. The proposed method has its application in different areas such as medical imagery, military imagery and law forensics, where no distortion of the original cover is allowed.