A reversible data hiding method for encrypted images

Since several years, the protection of multimedia data is becoming very important. The protection of this multimedia data can be done with encryption or data hiding algorithms. To decrease the transmission time, the data compression is necessary. Since few years, a new problem is trying to combine in a single step, compression, encryption and data hiding. So far, few solutions have been proposed to combine image encryption and compression for example. Nowadays, a new challenge consists to embed data in encrypted images. Since the entropy of encrypted image is maximal, the embedding step, considered like noise, is not possible by using standard data hiding algorithms. A new idea is to apply reversible data hiding algorithms on encrypted images by wishing to remove the embedded data before the image decryption. Recent reversible data hiding methods have been proposed with high capacity, but these methods are not applicable on encrypted images. In this paper we propose an analysis of the local standard deviation of the marked encrypted images in order to remove the embedded data during the decryption step. We have applied our method on various images, and we show and analyze the obtained results.