Reversible Data Hiding in Permutation-based Encrypted Images with Strong Privacy

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) provides some real-time cloud applications; i.e. the cloud, acting as a data-hider, automatically embeds timestamp in the encrypted image uploaded by a content owner. Many existing methods of RDHEI only satisfy user privacy in which the data-hider does not know the original image, but leaks owner privacy in which the receiver can obtains the original image by decryption and extraction. In the literature, the method of Zhang et al. is the one providing weak content-owner privacy in which the content-owner and data-hider have to share a data-hiding key. In this paper, we take care of the stronger notion, called strong content-owner privacy, and achieve it by presenting a new reversible data hiding in encrypted images. In the proposed method, image decryption and message extraction are separately controlled by different types of keys, and thus such functionalities are decoupled to solve the privacy problem. At the technique level, the original image is segmented along a Hilbert filling curve. To keep image privacy, segments are transformed into an encrypted image by using random permutation. The encrypted image does not reveal significant information about the original one. Data embedment can be realized by using pixel histogram-style hiding, since this property, can be preserved before or after encryption. The proposed method is a modular method to compile some specific reversible data hiding to those in encrypted image with content owner privacy. Finally, our experimental results show that the image quality is 50.85dB when the averaged payload is 0.12bpp.