Title: High capacity reversible steganography in encrypted images based on feature mining in plaintext domain

Authors: Zhaoxia Yin; Wien Hong; Jin Tang; Bin Luo

Addresses: Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing, Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, No. 111, Jiulong Rd, Hefei, China ' Department of Electronics Communication and Software Engineering, Nanfang College, Sun Yat-Sen University, China ' Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing, Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, No. 111, Jiulong Rd, Hefei, China ' Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Signal Processing, Ministry of Education, College of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, No. 111, Jiulong Rd, Hefei, China

Abstract: A reversible steganographic scheme in encrypted images with high capacity based on feature mining in plaintext domain is proposed in this paper. Two techniques are used: multi-granularity encryption and residual histogram shifting. Firstly, a cover image is encrypted both on fine-grained level and coarse-grained level with content-owner key. Then, the additional data can be embedded into the encrypted image by exploring both the similarity of neighbouring pixels in local level and residual histogram in global level with data-hiding key. For legal receivers, image decryption and data extraction can be free to choose. If content-owner key and data-hiding key are both adopted at the same time, the cover image can be restored error-free along with data extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the previous approaches both in terms of embedding quality and embedding capacity.

Keywords: reversible steganography; encrypted images; RSEI; multi-granularity encryption; MGE; embedding capacity; error-free; high capacity steganography; feature mining; plain text; cryptography; residual histogram shifting; image decryption; data extraction.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2016.076118

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2016 Vol.8 No.2/3, pp.249 - 257

Received: 23 Sep 2014
Accepted: 26 Dec 2014

Published online: 26 Apr 2016 *

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