A unified data embedding and scrambling method

Reversible Data Hiding Based on Dual Pairwise Prediction-Error Expansion

Reversible data hiding generally exploits the redundancy of the cover medium and prediction-error expansion (PEE) has become the most effective mechanism. However, although the pairwise PEE technique has been proposed to jointly modify the prediction-errors to achieve less degradation, there is still room for improvement. In this paper, a dual pairwise PEE strategy is proposed to fully exploit the potential of pairwise PEE. The key observation behind dual pairwise PEE lies in that most capacity is provided by individually expanding only one pairing error. For such separable error-pairs, we propose to recalculate and collect the rest pairing error to form an error sequence after shifting any one pairing error. Next, by considering every two neighboring errors of the sequence together, a new set of error-pairs for double pairwise PEE can be obtained. Compared with original pairwise PEE, dual pairwise PEE significantly better exploits the correlation of errors such that it leads to better capacity-distortion performance. Experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms several state-of-the-art schemes.

A Method of Signal Scrambling to Secure Data Storage for Healthcare Applications

A body sensor network that consists of wearable and/or implantable biosensors has been an important front-end for collecting personal health records. It is expected that the full integration of outside-hospital personal health information and hospital electronic health records will further promote preventative health services as well as global health. However, the integration and sharing of health information is bound to bring with it security and privacy issues. With extensive development of healthcare applications, security and privacy issues are becoming increasingly important. This paper addresses the potential security risks of healthcare data in Internet-based applications and proposes a method of signal scrambling as an add-on security mechanism in the application layer for a variety of healthcare information, where a piece of tiny data is used to scramble healthcare records. The former is kept locally and the latter, along with security protection, is sent for cloud storage. The tiny data can be derived from a random number generator or even a piece of healthcare data, which makes the method more flexible. The computational complexity and security performance in terms of theoretical and experimental analysis has been investigated to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed method is applicable to all kinds of data that require extra security protection within complex networks.

Optimizing Non-Local Pixel Predictors for Reversible Data Hiding

This paper presents a two-step clustering and optimizing pixel prediction method for reversible data hiding, which exploits self-similarities and group structural information of non-local image patches. Pixel predictors play an important role for current prediction-error expansion (PEE) based reversible data hiding schemes. Instead of using a fixed or a content- adaptive predictor for each pixel independently, the authors first employ pixel clustering according to the structural similarities of image patches, and then for all the pixels assigned to each cluster, an optimized pixel predictor is estimated from the group context. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-art counterparts such as the simple rhombus neighborhood, the median edge detector, and the gradient-adjusted predictor et al.