Encrypted image-based reversible data hiding with public key cryptography from difference expansion

•We propose a new encrypted image-based reversible data hiding with public key cryptography from difference expansion.•The core of the proposed scheme is to pre-process an image with the property of difference expansion before encrypting.•The proposed scheme provide good payload and image quality.

Encrypted image-based reversible data hiding (EIRDH) is a well-known notion of information hiding. In EIRDH, there are three entities, image provider (also called “context owner”), data hider, and receiver, where particularly they have to hold a shared key. The image provider sends the data hider the encrypted image by encrypting a chosen cover-image. Then, the hider generates the message-embedded encrypted image to the receiver by embedding the secret message. The receiver can simultaneously recover the original cover-image and extract the correct secret message. However, the data hider and image provider must be designated parties; this is, encrypted image-based reversible data hiding with public key cryptography (EIRDH-P) is a natural issue to eliminate the above limitation. In this paper, we construct the new EIRDH-P scheme from difference expansion (DE). We also analyze our scheme with respect to computation and communication. Finally, the experimental results show the effectiveness of this scheme. As pure image-based reversible data hiding from DE, the proposed EIRDH-P from DE also enjoys the advantages of DE.