A Reversible Data Hiding Algorithm Based on Image Camouflage and Bit-Plane Compression

Reversible data hiding in encrypted image (RDHEI) is a widely used technique for privacy protection, which has been developed in many applications that require high confidentiality, authentication and integrity. Proposed RDHEI methods do not allow high embedding rate while ensuring losslessly recover the original image. Moreover, the ciphertext form of encrypted image in RDHEI framework is easy to cause the attention of attackers. This paper proposes a reversible data hiding algorithm based on image camouflage encryption and bit plane compression. A camouflage encryption algorithm is used to transform a secret image into another meaningful target image, which can cover both secret image and encryption behavior based on “plaintext to plaintext” transformation. An edge optimization method based on prediction algorithm is designed to improve the image camouflage encryption quality. The reversible data hiding based bit-plane level compression, which can improve the redundancy of the bit plane by Gray coding, is used to embed watermark in the camouflage image. The experimental results also show the superior performance of the method in terms of embedding capacity and image quality.