Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Image Based on (7, 4) Hamming Code and UnitSmooth Detection

Abstract

With the development of cloud storage and privacy protection, reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) plays the dual role of privacy protection and secret information transmission. RDHEI has a good application prospect and practical value. The current RDHEI algorithms still have room for improvement in terms of hiding capacity, security and separability. Based on (7, 4) Hamming Code and our proposed prediction/ detection functions, this paper proposes a Hamming Code and UnitSmooth detection based RDHEI scheme, called HUD-RDHEI scheme for short. To prove our performance, two database sets—BOWS-2 and BOSSBase—have been used in the experiments, and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and pure embedding rate (ER) are served as criteria to evaluate the performance on image quality and hiding capacity. Experimental results confirm that the average pure ER with our proposed scheme is up to 2.556 bpp and 2.530 bpp under BOSSBase and BOWS-2, respectively. At the same time, security and separability is guaranteed. Moreover, there are no incorrect extracted bits during data extraction phase and the visual quality of directly decrypted image is exactly the same as the cover image.