A Study of Reversible Data Hiding Technology with an Authentication Function

Digital signature is a very effective verification tool in checking electronic documents, but it does not apply to digital image, because digital images can fail to be verified by a digital signature with slight interference. To achieve the dual purpose of both verifying the copyright information of a digital image and restoring the original image without loss, in this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding scheme with an authentication function. The digital signature is first QR-coded, then the disrupted confidential data is embedded into the digital image. When digital signature verification is performed, it is only necessary to restore the stego image to the original image and extract the QR code according to the reversible algorithm. The experimental results show that the reversible data hiding algorithm can be embedded in each image block with up to 6 bits of data, its embedding block ratio reaches 87.42% on the average, which effectively improves the embedding capacity while the quality of the carrier image remains relatively stable, and is also robust against non-deliberate attacks on image processing; the strong error correction capability of the QR code also improves the success rate of digital signature verification.