A new scheme to protect confidential images

A new and efficient scheme to protect confidential images is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme does not use a secret key to protect confidential images as conventional encryption schemes do, and nor are there cipher images corresponding to the confidential images. A confidential image can be reconstructed easily by the cooperation of all the participants in a special group. Each participant of the special group holds a virtual image which can show any picture, and she/he uses this virtual image to cooperate with the other legal participants to reconstruct the confidential image. These pictures shown in the virtual images are significantly different and are unrelated to each other. Besides, they bear no relation to the confidential image either. According to our experimental results, each reconstructed confidential image does turn out to look like the original confidential image through our human visual system and its PSNR is greater than 34 dB.