Unified Data Hiding and Scrambling Method for JPEG Images

This paper proposes a novel method of unified data hiding and JPEG scrambling. This differs from the traditional image encryption algorithms in that, we propose to construct a privacy-preserved JPEG image during the data hiding procedure. That is while the scrambling operation masks the JPEG image content by the secret key, the additional messages is also represented by the sequence of the shuffled RLE (Run Length Encoding) pairs. Therefore, images uploaded to the cloud server unable to reveal the original content. Meanwhile, the owner can use the embedded messages for fragile watermarking, JPEG labeling and image management. The proposed method is reversible. After downloading a copy from the cloud, an authorized user can extract the hidden message and recover the original JPEG losslessly and simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides a large embedding payload and has a good capability for preserving privacy.