Reversible Information Hiding and Its Application to Image Authentication

Abstract

This chapter addresses a new class of Reversible Information Hiding (RIH) and its application to verifying the integrity of images. The method of RIH distorts an image once to hide information in the image itself, and it not only extracts embedded information but also recovers the original image from the distorted image. The well-known class of RIH is based on the expansion of prediction error in which a location map, which indicates the pixel block positions of a certain block category, is required to recover the original image. In contrast, the method described in this chapter is free from having to memorize any parameters including location maps. This feature suits the applications of image authentication in which the integrity of extracted information guarantees that of a suspected image. If image-dependent parameters such as location maps are required, the suspected image should first be identified from all possible images. The method described in this chapter reduces such costly processes.