High capacity reversible data hiding scheme for encrypted images

•The scheme achieves the complete reversibility.•None of incorrect bits are incurred by the proposed scheme•The scheme improves the visual quality of marked embedded images•High embedding capacity is obtained

Reversible data hiding is a technique that allows embedding additional data into encrypted images without knowing the content of the original image. The additional embedded data can be extracted exactly and the encrypted image can be reconstructed precisely to its original version. In this paper, a novel, reversible data hiding technique is proposed for encrypted images. In the proposed scheme, half of the pixels are used to classify the rest of the pixels into smooth and complex regions to provide room for embedding additional data. The proposed scheme can achieve complete reversibility, i.e., the data extraction and image reconstruction are error-free. Our experimental results indicated that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms existing schemes in terms of embedding capacity and the visual quality of the marked decrypted image.