A High-Capacity Reversible Data-Hiding Scheme for Medical Image Transmission Using Modified Elias Gamma Encoding

Abstract

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is a recently emerged research domain in the field of information security domain with broad applications in medical images and meta-data handling in the cloud. The amount of data required to handle the healthcare sector has exponentially increased due to the increase in the population. Medical images and various reports such as discharge summaries and diagnosis reports are the most common data in the healthcare sector. The RDH schemes are widely explored to embed the medical reports in the medical image instead of sending them as separate files. The receiver can extract the clinical reports and recover the original medical image for further diagnosis. This manuscript proposes an approach that uses a new lossless compression-based RDH scheme that creates vacant room for data hiding. The proposed scheme uses run-length encoding and a modified Elias gamma encoding scheme on higher-order bit planes for lossless compression. The conventional Elias gamma encoding process is modified in the proposed method to embed some additional data bits during the encoding process itself. The revised approach ensures a high embedding rate and lossless recovery of medical images at the receiver side. The experimental study is conducted on both natural images and medical images. The average embedding rate from the proposed scheme for the medical images is 0.75 bits per pixel. The scheme achieved a 0 bit error rate during image recovery and data extraction. The experimental study shows that the newly introduced scheme performs better when compared with the existing RDH schemes.