Reversible AMBTC-Based Data Hiding with Security Improvement by Chaotic Encryption

Social networking and cloud computing are being extensively used, and in this era, the frequency of sending information or images to each other is increasing. The prevention of private information leakage during communication over the Internet has become a concern in the past decades. Several data protection methods, such as cryptographic, watermarking, and steganography techniques, have been proposed to protect private data. In this paper, an embedding method is proposed based on an absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC)-compressed image. High and low mean tables are extracted from a compressed image and are divided into non-overlapping blocks. An adaptive variable N -bit bit plane truncation image embedding method is proposed to embed the secret data in each block. In this method, at the receiver end, the secret data are extracted, and the original AMBTC image could be recovered by recalling the stored peak and zero points. In addition, a chaotic encryption scheme is integrated into the proposed system to improve robustness against security vulnerability. The results show that the proposed method has superior performance and higher payload compared with the reference methods.