Reversible data hiding in encrypted images with high capacity by bitplane operations and adaptive embedding

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is a technique that makes contributions to cloud data management in privacy preservation and data security. A novel framework of RDHEI with high embedding capacity based on bitplane operations and adaptive embedding is proposed. Three parties constitute the proposed system: the content owner, the data hider and the receiver. First, the content owner encrypts the original image for privacy protection. A data hider partitions the encrypted image into two sub images by bitplane-level operations and embeds additional data with an adaptive embedding strategy. With the encrypted image containing the embedded data, the receiver can extract the embedded data without any error and losslessly recover the original image according to specific requirements. The proposed framework can not only work for many different specific image encryption methods but also accomplish hundreds of reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithms directly in the encrypted domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can significantly increase the embedding capacity of some existing RDHEI frameworks, although it may reduce the PSNR value.