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Reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on homomorphism and block-based congruence transformation

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Abstract

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is a technique that allows for secret data to be embedded in images while preserving the privacy of the image content when the image owner and the data hider are different entities. This paper proposes a new reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images, in which the data hider does not need a data hiding key in the data embedding process. We first reserve embedding room before image encryption based on the congruence relations of pixel values within image blocks. Then, the pre-processed original image is encrypted using a multi-secret sharing based image encryption algorithm that satisfies additive homomorphism. Using the homomorphism of the image encryption, we embed the secret data into the reserved embedding room directly in the encrypted images without a data hiding key. The receiver can extract the secret data by checking the congruence relation between pixel values in a decrypted image block and then recover the original image. We analyze the security of the proposed scheme and embedding capacity with different block sizes and different parameters of transformation. The experimental results and analysis show that the proposed scheme achieves a high embedding capacity with a suitable block size especially in smooth images.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by for Education-Scientific Project for Youth Teacher of Fujian province under grant: JT180618, in part by Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China under Grant: 2020J01300, and in part by Engineering Research Center for ICH Digitalization and Multi-Source Information Fusion of Fujian Province University under grant: FJ-ICH 201901.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, Fujian Polytechnic Normal University, Fuzhou, 350300, China

    Sisheng Chen

  2. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung, 40724, Taiwan

    Sisheng Chen & Chin-Chen Chang

  3. Engineering Research Center for ICH Digitalization and Multi-Source Information Fusion (Fujian Polytechnic Normal University), Fujian Province University, Fuzhou, 350300, China

    Sisheng Chen

  4. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, 41170, Taiwan

    Chia-Chen Lin

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  1. Sisheng Chen
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  2. Chin-Chen Chang
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Correspondence to Chin-Chen Chang.

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Chen, S., Chang, CC. & Lin, CC. Reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on homomorphism and block-based congruence transformation. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 33115–33138 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-11324-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-11324-x

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