Reversible and tunable scrambling-embedding method

This paper proposes a reversible unified method to scramble an image and embed information into it using row and column rotation methods. Each row (column) is divided into groups and rotated to the left (bottom) to distort the image. Unique states are derived during the rotation process and utilized to embed external information. In the decoding process, the pixel correlations in the vertical and horizontal directions are exploited to reconstruct the original image and extract the embedded information. The proposed method is able to control the output image quality to achieve its intended distortion using the control parameters. Experiments are conducted to verify the basic performance of the proposed method. Our previously proposed method is adopted to further improve the proposed method in terms of payload and quality degradation of the output image. It is verified that the original image can be perfectly reconstructed and the proposed method itself is able to achieve an average effective payload up to ~9015.0 bits. SSIM and PSNR values are measured to determine the range of achievable distortion using different parameters.