A High-Capacity Separable Reversible Method for Hiding Multiple Messages in Encrypted Images
This work addresses secure and efficient data hiding in encrypted images for applications like privacy-preserving communication, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing reversible data hiding methods.
The paper tackles the problem of hiding multiple messages in encrypted images by proposing a high-capacity separable reversible data hiding scheme, achieving perfect reconstruction of the original image even without data embedding keys at high embedding rates.
This work proposes a high-capacity scheme for separable reversible data hiding in encrypted images. At the sender side, the original uncompressed image is encrypted using an encryption key. One or several data hiders use the MSB of some image pixels to hide additional data. Given the encrypted image containing this additional data, with only one of those data hiding keys, the receiver can extract the corresponding embedded data, although the image content will remain inaccessible. With all of the embedding keys, the receiver can extract all of the embedded data. Finally, with the encryption key, the receiver can decrypt the received data and reconstruct the original image perfectly\ignore{ without the data embedding key(s) }by exploiting the spatial correlation of natural images. Based on the proposed method a receiver could recover the original image perfectly even when it does not have the data embedding key(s) and the embedding rate is high.