Distributed Encrypted Image-Based Reversible Data Hiding

Sensor cameras over wireless sensor networks are common devices to realize surveillance or data gathering. In general, the sensed images will be routed from sensors to gateways which can deliver the collection of images to the server. For routing, the nodes which are located between the source and terminate need to add some information (e.g., tags) into the images. Assuming that the communications among sensors and gateways are via insecure channels, encryption is a simple way to keeping confidentiality. However, except for using homomorphic encryption, it is not achieved to perform computation over ciphertext, so nodes cannot easily add message into the encrypted images. In this paper, we focus on a cloud-edge model, and propose a new distributed encrypted image-based reversible data hiding scheme, where given an image the edge produces encrypted ones and distributes them to intermediate nodes which then generate the message-embedded encrypted image, and finally the cloud can recover the original image and extract the message. Our techniques mainly utilize exclusive-OR secret sharing as encryption, and apply difference expansion and simple preprocessing for the embedding strategy. The experimental results are provided to show the efficiency and effectiveness of this scheme.