Reversible data hiding in encrypted image with secure multi-party for telemedicine applications

Privacy protection of electronic patient information (EPI) is a crucial concern in the telemedicine applications, especially when it comes to communication between patients and doctors. In this paper, we propose a high-capacity reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithm combined with secure multi-party computation for telemedicine applications. The pixel values within a 3 × 3-size image block are divided into embedded pixels (EPs) and sampled pixels (SPs), secret data is embedded into the prediction errors of EPs and SPs in two stages. In the first stage, two edge servers predict EPs using the four SPs in the block to obtain the prediction error of EPs. The secret data is embedded into EPs through addition operation and histogram shift method. In the second stage, the prediction error of SPs is calculated as the difference between EPs and SPs, and the embedding of secret data follows the same method as used in the first stage. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves a higher embedding rate compared to classical and state-of-the-art algorithms, with an average embedding rate of 0.47bpp on the UCID dataset. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm exhibits robustness against existing attacks.