Reversible data hiding framework with content authentication capability for e-health

Security of data exchanged and authentication of the content received are of paramount importance in the fields like healthcare, defense, the court of law, etc. In this paper, we propose a reversible embedding framework for effectively securing data besides authenticating the content at the receiver. It makes use of a Block-Based Histogram Bin Shifting (BBHBS) mechanism, capable of reversibly embedding the secret data and ensuring its security. To facilitate content authentication and detect any tampering in the received images, we compute Message Authentication Bit Vector (MABV) or Message Authentication Code (MAC) from the Region of Interest (ROI) of the cover image and embed it in the Region of Non-Interest (RONI) of the cover image. The receiver looks out for MABV and based on its value decides the authenticity of the received content. We have tested our scheme for medical as well as general images. The results show that the proposed scheme provides better subjective as well as objective results compared to state-of-art. The average Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the suggested approach for medical images is 51.57 dB for a payload of 0.518 bpp and for general images, it is 51.92 dB for a payload of 0.405 bpp.