Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images by Reversible Image Transformation

With the popularity of outsourcing data to the cloud, it is vital to protect the privacy of data and enable the cloud server to easily manage the data at the same time. Under such demands, reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDH-EI) attracts more and more researchers' attention. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for RDH-EI based on reversible image transformation (RIT). Different from all previous encryption-based frameworks, in which the ciphertexts may attract the notation of the curious cloud, RIT-based framework allows the user to transform the content of original image into the content of another target image with the same size. The transformed image, that looks like the target image, is used as the “encrypted image,” and is outsourced to the cloud. Therefore, the cloud server can easily embed data into the “encrypted image” by any RDH methods for plaintext images. And thus a client-free scheme for RDH-EI can be realized, that is, the data-embedding process executed by the cloud server is irrelevant with the processes of both encryption and decryption. Two RDH methods, including traditional RDH scheme and unified embedding and scrambling scheme, are adopted to embed watermark in the encrypted image, which can satisfy different needs on image quality and large embedding capacity, respectively.