High-capacity data hiding in encrypted images using MSB prediction

Abstract

In the last few years, visual privacy has become a major problem. Because of this, encrypted image processing has received a lot of attention within the scientific and business communities. Data hiding in encrypted images (DHEI) is an effective technique to embed data in the encrypted domain. The owner of an image encrypts it with a secret key and it is still possible to embed additional data without knowing the original content nor the secret key. This secret message can be extracted and the initial image can be recovered in the decoding phase. Recently, DHEI has become an investigative field, but the proposed methods do not allow a large amount of embedding capacity. In this paper, we present a new method based on the MSB (most significant bit) prediction. We suggest to hide one bit per pixel by pre-processing the image to avoid prediction errors and, thereby, to improve the quality of the reconstructed image. We have applied our method to various images and, in every cases, the obtained image is very similar to the original one in terms of PSNR or SSIM.