An interpolation-based reversible data hiding scheme for internet of things applications

Abstract The exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to an increased demand for secure and efficient data transmission methods. However, there is a tradeoff in the image quality and hiding capacity in the data hiding methods. Therefore, the maximum amount of data that could be stored in the image media is a difficult challenge while maintaining the image quality. Thus, to make the balance between the quality of the images and the embedding capacity, a novel interpolation-based revisable data hiding (RDH) approach is developed for IoT applications. The proposed interpolation technique takes the average of the root value for the product of two neighboring original pixel values and the third original pixel value. And for the central pixel, it takes an average of two interpolated pixels. By doing so, most of the original pixels are considered and the calculated interpolated pixel is much enhanced as its average value. Furthermore, the data hiding is performed in two stages. In the first stage, RSA is performed on the secret message, and then embedding is done based on which intensity range group. The experimental results indicate that the proposed technique enhanced the embedding capacity by 17.58% and produced 7.80% higher PSNR values for the test images as compared to the baseline methods.