An Adaptive Multi-level Block-wise Encryption based Reversible Data Hiding Scheme

The design and development of reversible data hiding algorithms got a lot of consideration in recent years because of its wide applicability in medical image transmission and cloud computing. In this paper, we propose a new reversible data hiding scheme though a block-wise multi-level image encryption process to hide lengthy secret messages in an image. In the proposed technique, the data hider will use two additional encryption keys K0 and K1 for reversible data hiding purpose other than the image encryption key K. During the process of data hiding, an encrypted image will be taken as the input and produces a final modified encrypted image with hidden data. For the extraction of data and recovery of image, the receiver needs the image decryption key K and the additional decryption keys K0 and K1. The naturalness property of the image blocks is analyzed to recover the image blocks through a multi-level decryption process. The standard images from the USC-SIPI dataset controlled by the University of Southern California are used to conduct the experimental study.