Visual Secret Sharing for Copyright Protection and Authentication of Color Images

Visual secret sharing (VSS) has become an important technique to work with watermarking or data hiding for digital rights management (DRM) applications. With VSS, binary image containing secret information can produce several shares, and when stacking part of the shares together, copyright owner can be authenticated. Considering the applications of progressive transmission of multimedia, we integrate the VSS-based reversible data hiding for color images. Two shares from VSS are hidden into different color planes of original image. With the modification of difference values between base and enhancement layers for progressive transmission, visual secret shares can also progressively embedded into original color image to obtain the marked image. After delivery of marked image, differences between layers can be calculated, and both the original image and visual secret shares can be obtained. Extracted shares from different color planes are then stacked together to obtain the embedded secret characters. Simulations have presented the effectiveness for practical implementations.