Reversible data hiding in encrypted images with multi-prediction and adaptive huffman encoding

Abstract

Abstract With the rapid development of multimedia technology and the massive accumulation of user data, a huge amount of data is rapidly generated and shared over the network, while the problems of inappropriate data access and abuse persist. Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is a privacy-preserving method that embeds protected data in an encrypted domain and accurately extracts the embedded data without affecting the original content. However, the amount of embedded data has been one of the major limitations in the performance and application of RDHEI. Currently, the main approaches to improve the capacity of RDHEI are either to increase the overall capacity or to reduce the length of the auxiliary information. In this paper, we propose a novel RDHEI scheme based on multi-prediction and adaptive Huffman encoding. To increase the overall capacity, we propose a multi-prediction, called MED+GAP predictor, to generate the label map data of non-reference pixels prior to image encryption. Then, an adaptive Huffman coding is designed to compress the generated labels in order to reduce the embedding length of the auxiliary information used for the extraction and recovery. Experiments show that the proposed method with MED+GAP predictor and adaptive Huffman coding improves 0.052 bpp, 0.023 bpp, and 0.047 bpp on average over the other state-of-the-art methods on the BOSSBase, BOWS-2, and UCID datasets, respectively, while maintaining security and reversibility.