Complete separable reversible data hiding in encrypted image

Abstract

Reversible data hiding in encrypted image (RDHEI) is an emerging technology since it has good potential for practical applications such as encrypted image authentication, content owner identification and privacy protection. But there is one key problem of many existing published works, that the embedded data only can be extracted either before or after image decryption. In this paper, a complete separable reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images is proposed. Additional data can be embedded into a cipher image which is encrypted by RC4 and can be extracted error-free both from the cipher domain and the plaintext domain. Moreover, the proposed method is simpler to calculate, while offering better performance. The results demonstrate that larger payload, better image quality, and error-free data extraction as well as image recovery are achieved.