High-capacity data hiding in encrypted images based on compressive sensing and intra-block difference coding

Data hiding in encrypted images (DHEI) can not only protect the content of the original image but also manage and control the encrypted image, which is important for protecting personal privacy and improving the efficiency of third-party data processing. However, the current DHEI algorithms still have room for progress in the embedding capacity. In this paper, a high-capacity DHEI algorithm based on compressive sensing and intra-block difference coding is proposed. The content-owner firstly utilizes the compressive sensing progressive reconstruction prediction method to obtain prediction error, then encodes the quantized prediction error and measurements, and finally gets the encrypted image by the stream cipher algorithm. The data-hider embeds secret data by bit substitution. The receiver executes the extraction of secret data or the recovery of the original image according to the possessed key. Experimental results show that our method achieves higher embedding capacity compared with other methods, and the reconstruction quality of the original image remains reliable at high embedding rate.