An Innovative Information Hiding Scheme Based on Block-Wise Pixel Reordering

Information has been uploaded and downloaded through the Internet, day in and day out, ever since we immersed ourselves in the Internet. Data security has become an area demanding high attention, and one of the most efficient techniques for protecting data is data hiding. In recent studies, it has been shown that the indices of a codebook can be reordered to hide secret bits. The hiding capacity of the codeword index reordering scheme increases when the size of the codebook increases. Since the codewords in the codebook are not modified, the visual performance of compressed images is retained. We propose a novel scheme making use of the fundamental principle of the codeword index reordering technique to hide secret data in encrypted images. By observing our experimental results, we can see that the obtained embedding capacity of 197,888 is larger than other state-of-the-art schemes. Secret data can be extracted when a receiver owns a data hiding key, and the image can be recovered when a receiver owns an encryption key.