In the past two decades, reversible data hiding (RDH), also referred to as lossless or invertible data hiding, has gradually become a very active research area in the field of data hiding. This has been verified by more and more papers on increasingly wide-spread subjects in the field of RDH research that have been published these days. In this paper, the various RDH algorithms and researches have been classified into the following six categories: 1) RDH into image spatial domain; 2) RDH into image compressed domain (e.g., JPEG); 3) RDH suitable for image semi-fragile authentication; 4) RDH with image contrast enhancement; 5) RDH into encrypted images, which is expected to have wide application in the cloud computation; and 6) RDH into video and into audio. For each of these six categories, the history of technical developments, the current state of the arts, and the possible future researches are presented and discussed. It is expected that the RDH technology and its applications in the real word will continue to move ahead.

Reversible Data Hiding: Advances in the Past Two Decades

Among various digital image formats used in daily life, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is the most popular. Therefore, reversible data hiding (RDH) in JPEG images is important and useful for many applications such as archive management and image authentication. However, RDH in JPEG images is considerably more difficult than that in uncompressed images because there is less information redundancy in JPEG images than that in uncompressed images, and any modification in the compressed domain may introduce more distortion in the host image. Furthermore, along with the embedding capacity and fidelity (visual quality), which have to be considered for uncompressed images, the storage size of the marked JPEG file should be considered. In this paper, based on the philosophy behind the JPEG encoder and the statistical properties of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients, we present some basic insights into how to select quantized DCT coefficients for RDH. Then, a new histogram shifting-based RDH scheme for JPEG images is proposed, in which the zero coefficients remain unchanged and only coefficients with values 1 and −1 are expanded to carry message bits. Moreover, a block selection strategy based on the number of zero coefficients in each $8\,\times \,8$ block is proposed, which can be utilized to adaptively choose DCT coefficients for data hiding. Experimental results demonstrate that by using the proposed method we can easily realize high embedding capacity and good visual quality. The storage size of the host JPEG file can also be well preserved.

Reversible Data Hiding in JPEG Images

A high capacity lossless data hiding scheme for JPEG images

Reversible data hiding in JPEG image based on DCT frequency and block selection

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) has been introduced for preserving image privacy and data embedding. RDHEI usually involves three parties, namely, the image provider, data hider, and receiver. On the security with key setting, there are three categories: share independent secret keys (SIK), shared one key (SOK), and share no secret keys (SNK). In SIK, the image provider and data hider must respectively and independently share secret keys with the receiver, whereas in SNK, no secret key is shared. However, the literature works proposed SNK-type schemes by using homomorphic encryption (with exorbitant computation cost). In this paper, we address the SOK setting, where only the image provider shares a secret key with the receiver, and the data hider can embed a secret message without any knowledge of this key. To realize our SOK scheme in a simple manner, we propose a new technique by using multi-secret sharing as the underlying encryption, which indeed induces a blow-up issue of the key size. For preserving the efficiency of the key size, we apply a compression by using lightweight cryptographic algorithms. Then, we demonstrate our SOK scheme based on the proposed techniques, and show effectiveness, efficiency, and security by experiments and analysis.

A New Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Image Based on Multi-Secret Sharing and Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms

This paper presents an improved method of the reversible data hiding for JPEG images proposed by Xuan, et al. The conventional method embeds data into the JPEG quantized 8 times 8 block DCT coefficients. In this method, we found that the blocks, located in the noisy part of the image, are not suitable for embedding data. The proposed method can judge whether a block consisted of 8 times 8 DCT coefficients is located in smooth part of image by using the DC coefficient of neighboring blocks. Our method can avoid the noisy part for embedding. It results in a better performance in terms of capacity-distortion behavior.

H. Sakai

Papers

Adaptive reversible data hiding for JPEG images