Hiding clinical information in medical images: An encrypted dual-image reversible data hiding algorithm with base-3 numeral framework

In current scenario, dual-image reversible data hiding techniques (RDH) have become very popular due to their ability to give more embedding rate and improved visual quality of stego images than conventional RDH algorithms. All these methods have been observed to exhibit superior results, but only on natural images. In case of the medical images, there is an inherent risk of underflow, since a lot of pixels tend to have low intensity value. So, a novel encrypted dual image reversible data hiding algorithm has been presented here that gives higher embedding rate than all the existing dual-image reversible data hiding algorithms by changing over secret binary message into base-3 numeral framework without any underflow issue. The reported results reveal that the proposed algorithm gave very high embedding rates on both natural and medical images. The embedding rates on medical images have been significantly higher than all the compared approaches. The proposed approach yielded an embedding rate of 1.53 bits per pixel for medical images, almost double than most of the existing methods.