An image intellectual property protection scheme for gray-level images using visual secret sharing strategy

In this paper, we describe an image protection method for image intellectual property. The concept of this paper is based on the visual secret sharing scheme. We use the visual secret sharing scheme to construct two shares (also called transparencies). One share is generated from the host image, and the other share is arbitrarily generated by the owner. When the owner needs to be identified, we can superimpose these two shares to recover the secret information in order to validate the ownership. Our method has three advantages. The first advantage is simple computation, which means that our method does not use any complex computations such as discrete cosine transformation (DCT), and thus our method can be executed efficiently. The second advantage is that our method does not change any pixels of the host image. The third advantage is that our method is secure and robust. From the experimental results, our method can tolerate several image attacks, e.g., blurring, cropping, sharpening, JPEG lossy compression, etc. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.