Lossless and Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images With Public-Key Cryptography

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 26; no. 9; pp. 1622 - 1631
• Main Authors: Zhang, Xinpeng, Long, Jing, Wang, Zichi, Cheng, Hang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computer systems; Cryptography; Data mining; Embedding; Encryption; Histograms; Image encryption; lossless data hiding; Multilayers; Pixels; Probabilistic logic; Public key cryptography; Public Key Infrastructure; Receivers; reversible data hiding
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2015.2433194
• ISSN: 1051-8215

This paper proposes lossless, reversible, and combined data hiding schemes for ciphertext images encrypted by public-key cryptosystems with probabilistic and homomorphic properties. In the lossless scheme, the ciphertext pixels are replaced with new values to embed the additional data into several least significant bit planes of ciphertext pixels by multilayer wet paper coding. Then, the embedded data can be directly extracted from the encrypted domain, and the data-embedding operation does not affect the decryption of original plaintext image. In the reversible scheme, a preprocessing is employed to shrink the image histogram before image encryption, so that the modification on encrypted images for data embedding will not cause any pixel oversaturation in plaintext domain. Although a slight distortion is introduced, the embedded data can be extracted and the original image can be recovered from the directly decrypted image. Due to the compatibility between the lossless and reversible schemes, the data-embedding operations in the two manners can be simultaneously performed in an encrypted image. With the combined technique, a receiver may extract a part of embedded data before decryption, and extract another part of embedded data and recover the original plaintext image after decryption.