RP-ASAF: Anonymous Submission of Application Framework Using RDHSI and Polynomial Interpolation

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is one special type of data hiding, and is widely used for many intended applications. Moreover, to protect the cover image, RDH in encrypted image (RDHEI) schemes are accordingly proposed. In RDHEI, if the marked image is lost, the cover image and the secret data cannot be restored. To address the issue of losing sub marked images, RDH in shared image (RDHSI) by secret sharing (SS) is proposed to achieve fault-tolerance. Recently, an anonymous application scenario using RDHSI is introduced, on which multiple data hiders in RDHSI serve as reviewers in a committee. When the number of agreement votes is above the threshold of SS, the application is approved. However, there are weaknesses in this application framework: (i) reviewers cannot provide equal right to vote (namely, they cannot cast “Yes” and “No” votes, respectively), and (ii) anonymous submission is not really achieved. In the paper, we propose a new RDHSI to allow data hiders can hide approved sub data or disapproved sub data into sub images. Therefore, how to perform recovery and extraction from n marked images (some embedded with “Yes” votes and some with “No” votes) should be carefully designed. Based on the consistency property of polynomial interpolation, we conduct verification, recovery and extraction algorithms from n marked images. In addition, we use Hamming codewords to represent pixel difference instead of directly hiding pixel difference for reversibility, and this improvement also improves the embedding capacity. Compare with the current anonymous application scheme using RDHSI, the embedding rate in this paper can reach 3.5 bits per pixel (bpp), which is an improvement of 2 bpp. Thus, it is more suitable for the anonymous submission of application framework.