Guest Editorial Introduction to Special Section on Modern Reversible Data Hiding and Watermarking

AbstractThe rapid development and growing of 4G and 5G mobile networks allow people all over the world to efficiently transmit and share data and information while bringing an increasing demand on information security. Data hiding is a general technique to embed secret messages to be protected in an imperceptible way into a cover media like an image, a video stream, or a document. Traditional data hiding intends to achieve high embedding capacity and imperceptibility of hidden secret messages for secure communication. However, it introduces permanent damage or distortion to the cover media when receiver extracts the secret messages from the cover media. To address this problem, reversible data hiding (RDH) was developed to allow the receiver completely extract the hidden secret messages while fully recovering the original cover media without any distortion. RDH has been widely used for many military and medical applications like the access authentication of reconnaissance images and the sharing of medical images in remote diagnosis. According to the format of cover media, RDH can be done in both plaintext and encryption domains. RDH in plaintext domain intends to embed the secret messages into the original cover media in a way that the marked media (the cover media with embedded secret messages) is visually the same as the original cover media and able to withstand the potential analysis. RDH in the encryption domain embeds the secret messages into the encrypted cover media (e.g., encrypted images) such that secret messages and cover media are protected in a high security level during transmission and completely reconstructed in the receiver side.