Reversible data hiding in encrypted images using median prediction and bit plane cycling-XOR

Existing reversible data hiding work in encrypted images (RDH-EI) mostly does not attain a good balance among good visual quality, large embedding capacity and high security performance. To address this problem, we design a new reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images by combining median prediction and bit plan cycling-XOR. Our scheme firstly estimates the most significant bit (MSB) of each pixel by considering the median value of its adjacent pixels and generates a prediction error map to mark these pixels whose MSB bits are predicted incorrectly. Subsequently, we divide bit planes of cover image and then implement plane cyclic exclusive OR from least significant bit (LSB) plane to MSB plane. The LSB plane is finally vacated to be free room. Furthermore, the processed image is encrypted by a stream cipher algorithm, and data hider can embed additional data into the LSB plane. Separable operations of data extraction, image decryption and image recovery can be achieved successfully by the receiver. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that compared with existing methods, our scheme can attain a better balance among good visual quality, large embedding capacity and high security performance.