Implementation of Reversible Data Hiding Using Suitable Wavelet Transform For Controlled Contrast Enhancement

Data Hiding is important for secrete communication and it is also essential to keep the data hidden to be received by the intended recipient only. The conventional Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) algorithms pursue high Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) at certain amount of embedding bits. Considering an importance of improvement in image visual quality than keeping high PSNR, a novel RDH scheme utilizing contrast enhancement to replace the PSNR was presented with the help of Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). In proposed work, the identification of suitable transform from different wavelet families is planned to enhance the security of data by encrypting it and embedding more bits with the original image to generate stego image. The obtained stego image will be transmitted to the other end, where the receiver will extract the transmitted secrete data and original cover image from stego image using required keys. It will use a proper transformation for the purpose of Controlled Contrast Enhancement (CCE) to achieve the intended RDH so that the amount of embedding data bits and visual perception will be enhanced. The difference of the transmitted original image and restored original image is minor, which is almost invisible for human eyes though more bits are embedded with the original image. The performance parameters are also calculated

A contrast-sensitive reversible visible image watermarking technique

A reversible (also called lossless, distortion-free, or invertible) visible watermarking scheme is proposed to satisfy the applications, in which the visible watermark is expected to combat copyright piracy but can be removed to losslessly recover the original image. We transparently reveal the watermark image by overlapping it on a user-specified region of the host image through adaptively adjusting the pixel values beneath the watermark, depending on the human visual system-based scaling factors. In order to achieve reversibility, a reconstruction/ recovery packet, which is utilized to restore the watermarked area, is reversibly inserted into non-visibly-watermarked region. The packet is established according to the difference image between the original image and its approximate version instead of its visibly watermarked version so as to alleviate its overhead. For the generation of the approximation, we develop a simple prediction technique that makes use of the unaltered neighboring pixels as auxiliary information. The recovery packet is uniquely encoded before hiding so that the original watermark pattern can be reconstructed based on the encoded packet. In this way, the image recovery process is carried out without needing the availability of the watermark. In addition, our method adopts data compression for further reduction in the recovery packet size and improvement in embedding capacity. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme compared to the existing methods

Survey on Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images Using POB Histogram Method

This paper describes a survey on reversible data hiding in encrypted images. Data hiding is a process to embed useful data into cover media. Data invisibility is its major requirement. Data hiding can be done in audio, video, image, text, and picture. Here use an image for data hiding especially digital images and existing method (Histogram Block Shift Base Method) HBSBM or POB. Now a day's reversible data hiding in encrypted images is in use due to its excellent property which is original cover image can be recovered with no loss after extraction of the embedded data. Also, it protects the original data. According to the level and kind of application one or more data hiding methods is used. Data hiding can be done in audio, video, text, and image and other forms of information. Some data hiding techniques emphasize on digital image security, some on the robustness of digital image hiding process while other's main focus is on imperceptibility of a digital image. The capacity of digital information which has to hide is also the main concern in some of the applications. The objective of some of the papers mentioned below is to achieve two or more than two parameters i.e. Security, robustness, imperceptibility and capacity but some of the parameters are trade-off which means only one can be achieved on the cost of other. So the data hiding techniques aiming to achieve maximum requirements i.e. security, robustness, capacity, imperceptibility etc. and which can be utilized in the larger domain of applications is desired. Related work for techniques used for data hiding in a digital image is described in this paper

Framework for reversible data hiding using cost-effective encoding system for video steganography

Importances of reversible data hiding practices are always higher in contrast to any conventional data hiding schemes owing to its capability to generate distortion free cover media. Review of existing approaches on reversible data hiding approaches shows variable scheme mainly focussing on the embedding mechanism; however, such schemes could be furthermore improved using encoding scheme for optimal embedding performance. Therefore, the proposed manuscript discusses about a cost-effective scheme where a novel encoding scheme has been used with larger block sizes which reduces the dependencies over larger number of blocks. Further a gradient-based image registration technique is applied to ensure higher quality of the reconstructed signal over the decoding end. The study outcome shows that proposed data hiding technique is proven better than existing data hiding scheme with good balance between security and restored signal quality upon extraction of data

A Brief Review of RIDH

The Reversible image data hiding (RIDH) is one of the novel approaches in the security field. In the highly sensitive domains like Medical, Military, Research labs, it is important to recover the cover image successfully, Hence, without applying the normal steganography, we can use RIDH to get the better result. Reversible data hiding has a advantage over image data hiding that it can give you double security surely

Reversible de-identification for lossless image compression using reversible watermarking

De-Identification is a process which can be used to ensure privacy by concealing the identity of individuals captured by video surveillance systems. One important challenge is to make the obfuscation process reversible so that the original image/video can be recovered by persons in possession of the right security credentials. This work presents a novel Reversible De-Identification method that can be used in conjunction with any obfuscation process. The residual information needed to reverse the obfuscation process is compressed, authenticated, encrypted and embedded within the obfuscated image using a two-level Reversible Watermarking scheme. The proposed method ensures an overall single-pass embedding capacity of 1.25 bpp, where 99.8% of the images considered required less than 0.8 bpp while none of them required more than 1.1 bpp. Experimental results further demonstrate that the proposed method managed to recover and authenticate all images considered.peer-reviewe

Vector-based Efficient Data Hiding in Encrypted Images via Multi-MSB Replacement

As an essential technique for data privacy protection, reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) methods have drawn intensive research interest in recent years. In response to the increasing demand for protecting data privacy, novel methods that perform RDHEI are continually being developed. We propose two effective multi-MSB (most significant bit) replacement-based approaches that yield comparably high data embedding capacity, improve overall processing speed, and enhance reconstructed images' quality. Our first method, Efficient Multi-MSB Replacement-RDHEI (EMR-RDHEI), obtains higher data embedding rates (DERs, also known as payloads) and better visual quality in reconstructed images when compared with many other state-of-the-art methods. Our second method, Lossless Multi-MSB Replacement-RDHEI (LMR-RDHEI), can losslessly recover original images after an information embedding process is performed. To verify the accuracy of our methods, we compared them with other recent RDHEI techniques and performed extensive experiments using the widely accepted BOWS-2 dataset. Our experimental results showed that the DER of our EMR-RDHEI method ranged from 1.2087 bit per pixel (bpp) to 6.2682 bpp with an average of 3.2457 bpp. For the LMR-RDHEI method, the average DER was 2.5325 bpp, with a range between 0.2129 bpp and 6.0168 bpp. Our results demonstrate that these methods outperform many other state-of-the-art RDHEI algorithms. Additionally, the multi-MSB replacement-based approach provides a clean design and efficient vectorized implementation.Comment: 14 pages; journa

Privacy-preserving information hiding and its applications

The phenomenal advances in cloud computing technology have raised concerns about data privacy. Aided by the modern cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption, it has become possible to carry out computations in the encrypted domain and process data without compromising information privacy. In this thesis, we study various classes of privacy-preserving information hiding schemes and their real-world applications for cyber security, cloud computing, Internet of things, etc. Data breach is recognised as one of the most dreadful cyber security threats in which private data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by unauthorised parties. Although encryption can obfuscate private information against unauthorised viewing, it may not stop data from illegitimate exportation. Privacy-preserving Information hiding can serve as a potential solution to this issue in such a manner that a permission code is embedded into the encrypted data and can be detected when transmissions occur. Digital watermarking is a technique that has been used for a wide range of intriguing applications such as data authentication and ownership identification. However, some of the algorithms are proprietary intellectual properties and thus the availability to the general public is rather limited. A possible solution is to outsource the task of watermarking to an authorised cloud service provider, that has legitimate right to execute the algorithms as well as high computational capacity. Privacypreserving Information hiding is well suited to this scenario since it is operated in the encrypted domain and hence prevents private data from being collected by the cloud. Internet of things is a promising technology to healthcare industry. A common framework consists of wearable equipments for monitoring the health status of an individual, a local gateway device for aggregating the data, and a cloud server for storing and analysing the data. However, there are risks that an adversary may attempt to eavesdrop the wireless communication, attack the gateway device or even access to the cloud server. Hence, it is desirable to produce and encrypt the data simultaneously and incorporate secret sharing schemes to realise access control. Privacy-preserving secret sharing is a novel research for fulfilling this function. In summary, this thesis presents novel schemes and algorithms, including: • two privacy-preserving reversible information hiding schemes based upon symmetric cryptography using arithmetic of quadratic residues and lexicographic permutations, respectively. • two privacy-preserving reversible information hiding schemes based upon asymmetric cryptography using multiplicative and additive privacy homomorphisms, respectively. • four predictive models for assisting the removal of distortions inflicted by information hiding based respectively upon projection theorem, image gradient, total variation denoising, and Bayesian inference. • three privacy-preserving secret sharing algorithms with different levels of generality