High capacity reversible data hiding in encrypted images using SIBRW and GCC

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, a reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) method combining GCC (group classification encoding) and SIBRW containing sixteen image-based rearrangement ways is proposed to achieve high-capacity data embedding in encrypted images. Each way of SIBRW aims at bringing strongly-correlated bits of each higher bit-plane together by rearranging each higher bit-plane. For each higher bit-plane, the optimal way achieving the most concentrated aggregation performance is selected from SIBRW to rearrange this bit-plane, and then, GCC compresses the rearranged bit-plane in group-by-group manner. By making full use of strong-correlation between adjacent groups, GCC can compress not only consecutive several groups whose bits are valued 1 (or 0) but also a single group so that a large embedding space is provided. The encryption method including the bit-level XOR-encryption and scrambling operations enhances the security. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve large embedding capacity and high security.