A High-Capacity Separable Reversible Method for Hiding Multiple Messages in Encrypted Images

This work proposes a high-capacity scheme for separable reversible data hiding in encrypted images. At the sender side, the original uncompressed image is encrypted using an encryption key. One or several data hiders use the MSB of some image pixels to hide additional data. Given the encrypted image containing this additional data, with only one of those data hiding keys, the receiver can extract the corresponding embedded data, although the image content will remain inaccessible. With all of the embedding keys, the receiver can extract all of the embedded data. Finally, with the encryption key, the receiver can decrypt the received data and reconstruct the original image perfectly by exploiting the spatial correlation of natural images. Based on the proposed method a receiver could recover the original image perfectly even when it does not have the data embedding key(s) and the embedding rate is high.