Meaningful Secret Image Sharing with Saliency Detection.

Jingwen Cheng,Xuan Wang,Xuehu Yan,Lintao Liu,Yue Jiang

doi:10.3390/e24030340

Jingwen Cheng, Xuan Wang + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/e24030340

Copy DOI

Abstract

Secret image sharing (SIS), as one of the applications of information theory in information security protection, has been widely used in many areas, such as blockchain, identity authentication and distributed cloud storage. In traditional secret image sharing schemes, noise-like shadows introduce difficulties into shadow management and increase the risk of attacks. Meaningful secret image sharing is thus proposed to solve these problems. Previous meaningful SIS schemes have employed steganography to hide shares into cover images, and their covers are always binary images. These schemes usually include pixel expansion and low visual quality shadows. To improve the shadow quality, we design a meaningful secret image sharing scheme with saliency detection. Saliency detection is used to determine the salient regions of cover images. In our proposed scheme, we improve the quality of salient regions that are sensitive to the human vision system. In this way, we obtain meaningful shadows with better visual quality. Experiment results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Highlights

With the development of artificial intelligence and internet technology, many studies have focused on the information security
There is a limit to the sum of identical bits, and for n different cover images, the salient regions are different
All the shares and reconstructed secret images have the same size as the original secret image, and no pixel expansion occurs

Summary

Introduction

With the development of artificial intelligence and internet technology, many studies have focused on the information security. Large amounts of images are transmitted in the cloud networks every day. Information hiding [2,3] are traditional image protection technologies, but they are not applicable in some scenarios. Secret image sharin g (SIS), as one of the applications of information theory in information security protection, has been widely used in many areas, such as blockchain [4], identity authentication [5,6] and distributed cloud storage [7,8]. In a secret image sharing scheme with a (k, n) threshold [9], a secret image is divided into n shadows and sent to n participants. If k or more shadows are collected, the original secret can be reconstructed. Less than k shadows reveal nothing of the secret image

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion