Abstract—Image encryption and reversible data hiding are two major areas of research in the field of information security. In this paper, we propose a new reversible data hiding scheme that provides an encrypted image as output, and which will be useful in secure medical image transmission. The novelty of the proposed scheme is that it generates an encrypted image as a by-product of reversible data hiding process. In the proposed scheme, the consecutive higher bit-planes having compression ratio less than 1 while using run-length coding with Elias-Gamma encoding scheme is considered. The compressed bits will be pseudo-randomly distributed in the same bit-plane, and the space created as a result of compression has been used to hide the secret message bits. Finally, the modified bit-planes are combined to generate the encrypted image. Experimental study shows that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of embedding rate without compromising encryption efficiency.

Index Terms—image encryption, reversible data hiding, run-length encoding, Elias-Gamma encoding, medical image transmission

Cite: V. M. Manikandan and V. Masilamani, "A Novel Reversible Data Hiding Scheme that Provides Image Encryption," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 64-68, June 2018. doi: 10.18178/joig.6.1.64-68