Reversible Data Hiding With Secret Encrypted Image Sharing and Adaptive Coding

To ensure the security of image information and facilitate efficient management in the cloud, the utilization of reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEIs) has emerged as pivotal. However, most existing RDHEI schemes suffer from lower security and limited embedding capacity. To tackle these challenges, we propose a reversible data hiding (RDH) with secret encrypted image sharing and adaptive coding scheme. Specifically, in the encryption phase, we introduce an improved secret sharing (SS) encryption method based on the Chinese remainder theorem for polynomials (CRTPs). This method not only improves the security of encrypted images but also vacates a larger room for embedding. In the embedding phase, we introduce an adaptive coding embedding approach using <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">xor</small> preservation (XORP) and huffman coding, which provides high embedding capacity. Experimental results and security analysis demonstrate that our proposed encryption method achieves optimal values in security indicators for encrypted images, such as information entropy, histograms, number of pixels change rate and unified average changing intensity. The proposed embedding method is superior to some state-of-the-art schemes in terms of embedding capacity. Furthermore, in datasets BOSSBase and BOWS2, the average embedding rates of the proposed embedding approach can reach 2.1745 bits per pixel (bpp) and 2.0656 bpp, respectively.