High-capacity reversible data hiding in encrypted image based on Huffman coding and differences of high nibbles of pixels

Abstract In this paper, we propose a new reversible data hiding method in encrypted images. Due to spatial correlation, there is a large probability that the adjacent pixels of the image have small differences, which is especially obvious on the high four most significant bits (high nibbles) of the pixels. If the high nibble of each pixel is regarded as a 4-bit value, the differences between the high nibbles of the adjacent pixels are mostly concentrated in a small range. Based on this fact, Huffman coding was used to encode all the differences between the high nibbles of the adjacent pixels in order to compress the four most significant bit (MSB) planes efficiently and create a large-capacity room. After creating room, a stream cipher is used to encrypt the image, and the room is reserved in the encrypted image for data hiding without losing information. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can achieve a larger embedding rate and better visual quality of the marked decrypted image than other related methods.