Reversible Data Hiding via Bit‐Plane Block Rearrangement and Intra‐Block Compression Coding for Encrypted Images

ABSTRACT Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) enables secret data embedding within encrypted images while allowing for the lossless recovery of the original image after data extraction. This technique holds significant applications in various domains such as cloud storage and data security. However, many existing RDHEI methods suffer from limited embedding capacity. To address this limitation, we present a novel and high capacity RDHEI algorithm via bit‐plane block rearrangement and intra‐block compression coding (hereafter BRBCC algorithm). First, the prediction error (PE) image is generated by using a median edge detection predictor, and the high‐order zero‐valued bit‐planes are compressed. The non‐zero‐valued bit‐planes are then separated into non‐overlapping blocks that can be classified as all‐zero blocks, embeddable blocks, or non‐embeddable blocks. These blocks are then sorted and grouped in terms of block type for block coding. Finally, a new intra‐block compression coding technique with small coded data for locating block elements is proposed to conduct effective compression and thereby reserve more space for embedding secret data. Experimental results indicate that the embedding rates of the BRBCC algorithm reach 3.9381 and 3.8436 bpp on the public datasets of BOSSbase and BOWS‐2, respectively, outperforming some state‐of‐the‐art RDHEI algorithms and exhibiting good application potential.