Privacy-Preserving Reversible Data Hiding for Medical Images Employing Local Rotation

As digitalization becomes more common, patients' concerns about the leakage of private information, such as electronic medical record, are increasing, and those concerns motivated this case study of secure covert communication. Therefore, in this paper, a novel reversible data hiding method based on pixel rotation is proposed for medical images. Using pixel rotation, a state mapping model is constructed to represent the payload. More specifically, many intermediate states are derived from an image block, and each of them is used to form a one-to-one mapping relationship with a specific sequence of payload bits. In addition, to ensure the visual quality of stego-medical-images, the payload bits are only concealed in the regular blocks and the other blocks are unchanged. Moreover, the smoother regular image block will be priority to be used to embed the payload to enhance the visual quality of stego-medical-image. The experimental results showed that the stego-medical-images generated by the proposed reversible data hiding method have better visual quality with an average PSNR of 47.0307 dB, which is higher than that provided by some state-of-the-art methods.