A Universal Reversible Data Hiding Method in Encrypted Image Based on MSB Prediction and Error Embedding

Image encryption is used for privacy protection in cloud computing. Nowadays, reversible data hiding in encrypted image (RDHEI) has achieved great success with the demand of embedding additional information into encrypted image. The existing algorithms cannot implement large embedding capacity and good reconstructed image quality simultaneously. Besides, the universality of some methods is limited when they are used in images with different textural characteristics. In this work, an RDHEI method based on most significant bit (MSB) prediction and error embedding is proposed. On one hand, all types of prediction errors are considered in the proposed method, therefore all the pixels with prediction errors can be recovered correctly. On the other hand, error blocks are utilized to mark the locations of prediction errors and message blocks are utilized to embed data. Moreover, flag blocks are utilized to distinguish error and message blocks. To solve the problem of misjudgement for flag blocks in the decoding phase, special operations are conducted on error blocks and message blocks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art RDHEI methods, the proposed method has good universality on well-known databases.