Reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on absolute mean difference of multiple neighboring pixels

• Our proposed method can increase the correctness of data extraction/image recovery.
• Design a new function to estimate the complexity of image blocks sufficiently.
• The data embedding ratio is considered when the method is performed.

Recently, with the development of cloud computing, more and more secret data are stored in cloud. Reversible data hiding in encrypted images is a technique that makes contribution to cloud data management in privacy preserving and data security. In previous works, Zhang and Hong presented two reversible dada hiding methods in encrypted images, respectively. However, Zhang’s work neglected the pixels in the borders of image blocks, and Hong et al.’s research only considered two adjacent pixels of each pixel. In addition, their works only considered that all image blocks are embedded into additional data. In this paper, we propose a novel method of evaluating the complexity of image blocks, which considers multiple neighboring pixels according to the locations of different pixels. Furthermore, data embedding ratio is considered. Experiments show that this novel method can reduce average extracted-bit error rate when the block size is appropriate.