Reversible image visual transformation for privacy and content protection
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Reversible image visual transformation for privacy and content protection Hao-Tian Wu1
· Ruoyan Jia1 · Jean-Luc Dugelay2 · Junhui He1
Received: 20 March 2020 / Revised: 27 July 2020 / Accepted: 24 September 2020 / © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this paper, a novel image transformation scheme is proposed to protect the visual information. By mimicking an arbitrarily chosen reference image, a secret image is visually changed and can be exactly recovered from the transformed image when needed. Unlike the blockwise visual encryption methods, the proposed transformation scheme modifies the secret image by bit plane replacement and reordering so that no block effect is introduced. In particular, one or more bit planes are hidden into the other bit planes so that the most significant one(s) can be vacated. Besides replacing the vacated bit plane(s) and reordering the others according to the reference image, histogram modification may be performed to conceal the secret content if needed. To exactly recover the secret image, the required information is recorded and reversibly hidden into the transformed image by adopting a reversible data hiding algorithm. The experimental results on three image sets show that their content can be semantically changed to prevent leakage of visual information. Moreover, the applicability and efficiency of the proposed scheme have been validated by comparing the existing visual encryption schemes. Keywords Visual encryption · Histogram · Bit plane · Privacy protection · Reversible data hiding
Hao-Tian Wu
[email protected] Ruoyan Jia [email protected] Jean-Luc Dugelay [email protected] Junhui He [email protected] 1
School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, GD 510006, China
2
Digital Security Department, EURECOM, Biot, F-06410, France
Multimedia Tools and Applications
1 Introduction Nowadays, the well-developed social network services are widely available. As it is convenient to share pictures, voices and videos with these services, it is more and more challenging to protect the user privacy and digital content. Sometimes people want to share pictures with their friends but do not want others to see them due to the concerns of privacy and sensitive content. To protect image content, there are two categories of encryption methods, i.e., traditional and visual encryptions. Although traditional encryption schemes can be used to protect image content from being leaked, the file format is changed so that the encrypted file cannot be directly used. Furthermore, the scrambled cipher-text may cause attentions of attackers. Compared with traditional encryption, visual encryption schemes make the sensitive content invisible without changing the image format. To recover the original secret image, additional information should be reversibly embedded into the visual encrypted image with reversible data hiding (RDH). As a branch of data hiding, RDH can be performed in a lossless way so tha
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