Reversible data hiding in encrypted images using adaptive reversible integer transformation

Abstract Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDH-EI) is a technique that hides additional data into the ciphertext with a capability of recovering the original content losslessly. In recent years, many methods have been proposed on this topic. In this paper, we propose a new RDH-EI approach that can achieve a very large embedding capacity, using adaptive reversible integer transformation. We first divide the original image into non-overlapped blocks. With an algorithm of adaptive reversible integer transformation, we vacate the embedding room for accommodating the auxiliary data and the payload. After image encryption and uploading, the cloud server can hide a large amount of additional data into the ciphertext using the embedded auxiliary data. The process is reversible that the additional data can be extracted exactly and the original image can be recovered without any error. Compared with state-of-the-art RDH-EI methods, the proposed method can achieve a much higher embedding capacity and a better rate distortion performance.