Reversible data hiding in encrypted images using prediction error modification and basic block compression

Abstract

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is an effective method for privacy protection, medical diagnosis, and covert communication. It can also facilitate the management of large amounts of encrypted images. Despite recent advances in RDHEI methods, several issues remain, including the inefficiency of compression and the excess of auxiliary data. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel RDHEI method based on prediction error modification (PEM) and basic block compression (BBC). PEM greatly increases the occurrence of PE “0” (a PE with a value of 0) and reduces the information entropy of PEs by decreasing the positive PEs or increasing the negative PEs. The modified PEs are then divided into non-overlapping blocks which are subsequently compressed based on the proposed BBC technique. After PEM and image compression, the secret data is embedded into the encrypted image to generate the marked image, from which authorized recipients can extract the hidden payload and recover the original image non-destructively. Experimental results show that the proposed method is highly resistant to statistical analysis, brute force, and differential attacks, and outperforms some state-of-the-art methods in terms of embedding capacity.