Protection of privacy in JPEG files using reversible information hiding

The privacy of unknown person may be included in the digital images unintentionally. The action of the file upload of it would constitute an invasion of his/her privacy. The JPEG files may include an exif information which is regarded as personal privacy. For these two privacy problems, we propose a privacy protection technique for JPEG files using reversible information hiding. We adopt the reversible information hiding for the region included privacy in the image. We are also able to protect personal privacy if we embed an exif information into the region. We use Coltuc´s method, which changes the pixel value to carry the additional information directly, as a reversible information hiding. Although Coltuc´s method modifies the pixel value of cover image directly, we apply this to quantized DCT coefficients of it. In the experiments, we investigate our method and show an example of privacy protection image.