Secret multimedia information sharing with data hiding capacity by simple logic operations

Abstract

An effective scheme for secret multimedia information sharing with data hiding capacity is proposed. A set of secret data is shared into an arbitrary number of sets of pre-designed camouflage data and a corresponding set of meaningless data. Utilizing the characteristic of visualization, we can employ the scheme to share, e.g., a landscape image into several portraits and a meaningless image, The scheme can as well be applied to other multimedia data, like voice, video, and so on. So we can share a paragraph of words into several pleasant melodies and share a section of a cartoon movie into several sections of science-fiction movies. When a set of secret data is shared, the effect of data hiding is achieved in the mean time from another point of view because the shares can be other meaningful camouflage data sets. For cases of small numbers of shares, a revised version of the scheme is proposed to improve the data hiding effect. An advantage of the proposed scheme is that only simple logic operations are used in creating the shares and recovering the secret data. Simple logic operations inherit the properties of fast computation and easy implementation, which make the scheme more practical for real applications. Security is also ensured. The secret key is distributed instead of being centralized. If not all shares are collected, no information about the original secret data can be gained.