Privacy-Enhanced High-Fidelity Separable Lossless Reversible Data Hiding

Obtaining commercial value of private information from big data has become commonplace, which leads to misuse of information knowledge as well as violation of information owners’ rights, and curbing such behaviors has become a challenge. In this paper, we design an embedding scheme that can be applied to privacy protection of secret information, i.e., embedding confidential information such as copyright as secret information in cover images. The secret information is divided into multiple clusters, encrypted and compressed through the use of multiple-zone folding method to optimize the embedding efficiency and minimize the distortion caused by the embedding process, it realizes the privacy feature of traceability and security protection of secret information in circulation. Evaluated by security analysis and experimental results, this proposed scheme achieves IND-CPA high information security level for information protection. Compared with the state-of-the-art scheme, the computational complexity of this proposed scheme is <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">O</i>(<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Y</i>) (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Y</i> denotes the total number of pixels), at least 6 bits of information can be embedded per pixel which improves the efficiency of embedding. In terms of the impact on the quality of cover image information after the embedding of secret information, it has better performance, and improves the manageable traceability of information.