Reversible Data Hiding in Encrypted Images: A Progressive Recovery Framework for Confidentiality and Integrity

The rapid expansion of cloud-based platforms to store and transmit sensitive data has raised an imperative to develop reliable and fully reversible strategies that maintain data privacy protection of images and allow embedding additional data. Traditional reversible approaches to data hiding (RDH) are not effective with encrypted images, where encryption breaks spatial redundancy and capacity. To ensure this, we would suggest a stepwise restoration-based RDH scheme of encrypted images (RDH-EI). The system operates on two-key management strategy meaning the encryption and data-hiding keys are non-dependent, thus each can be performed independently to extract data and decoding of the image. The data is coded on a series of least significant bit (LSB) layers with improved capacity and low distortion. The experimental findings indicate that safe, loss-free restoration of both secreted information and original photographs is achievable, and as a consequence, the method is highly suitable in cloud storage, medical imaging, rights administration, and safe communications.