Our main goal is to develop new reversible data hiding (RDH) schemes for the encrypted domain based on two distinct frameworks: Vacating Room Before/After Encryption (VRBE/VRAE). The creation of a VRAE scheme with good performance and a standard decryption stage is of great interest to the RDH research community. A proprietary encryption stage (commonly found in VRBE approaches) is a notable limiting factor, but such a limitation is much more acceptable if the decryption stage uses a standard algorithm. A key aspect to achieving this goal is using plaintext RDH to store the auxiliary data. Our extensive knowledge of plaintext RDH offers us an advantage for developing novel approaches for the encrypted domain.
The new data hiding schemes for the encrypted domain will offer similar embedding capacities to previous approaches, but with a significant reduction in embedding distortion. In addition to the increase in performance, our new approaches will also remove the most notable limitation of Vacating Room Before Encryption frameworks, namely the proprietary decoding algorithm. We estimate that the results of our research will consist of least 2-3 papers published in Top 25% journals (IEEE Trans. on Inf. Forensics and Security, IEEE Trans. on Image Proc., IEEE Signal Processing Letters, etc.) and 6-8 conference papers (IEEE ICIP, IEEE WIFS, IEEE ICASSP, EUSIPCO, etc.).
