Separable reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on flexible preservation of the differences

To better protect the security of users’ private data in the cloud environment, the technology for separable reversible data hiding in encrypted images has been attracting increasing attention from researchers. In this paper, we propose a separable reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images based on the flexible preservation of differences. This scheme has three parts: 1) For the content owner, the original image is divided into non-overlapping blocks, for which block-mean is computed. Then the differences between the values of every pixel and the block-mean are obtained and an initial label map is generated. Because most of the differences tend to concentrate around 0, we use two bits to dynamically record the range of the differences to vacate space for hiding. Further, introducing the block-mean differences also serves to vacate more space, for which the label map is amended accordingly. Finally, the image with free space is encrypted into the encrypted image using an encryption key. 2) For the data hider, the secret bits are embedded into the encrypted image by directly replacing the spare bits without obtaining any information of the original image. 3) For the receiver, he/she can achieve the desired information according to the key in his/her possession. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme is able to achieve an average embedding capacity as large as 1.785 bpp and 1.709 bpp when block size is set to 2 × 2 and 2 × 4, respectively. Comparison with those of previous schemes, the proposed scheme has excellent embedding capacity, especially for smoother images.