Privacy-preserving data hiding with robustness based on selective encryption and matrix embedding

With the increasing need for privacy-preserving, data hiding in encrypted images has attracted more attention in the data hiding area. The existing data hiding methods for encrypted images mainly focus on improving the embedding capacity. Recently, some researchers have begun to pay attention to the robustness of the data hiding in encrypted images. However, there are few robust schemes for data hiding schemes in encrypted images. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving data hiding method with robustness. We apply a selective encryption method based on discrete cosine Transformed (DCTed) sign components encryption and block-level scrambling to encrypt the original image for privacy-preserving. The secret message is embedded into DCTed amplitude components using quantization index modulation and matrix embedding. The experimental results show that not only the marked decrypted images but also the marked encrypted images have the robustness to resist JPEG compression and white Gaussian noise disturbance to some degree.