Authentication and cross-recovery for multiple images

Abstract

We propose a system with image authentication and cross-recovery ability to protect a group of n given digital images. The system is a (r, n) threshold scheme (r is a prespecified threshold satisfying 2 <= r < n). Any r of these images can reconstruct the whole group of n images, but less than r images cannot. Therefore the system has cross-recovery ability because if some [up to (n-r)] images in the group are destroyed or lost in a distributed storage scheme or transmission mission, the destroyed or lost can be rebuilt vividly by the mutual support of r survived members. The design is composed of compression, a two-layer sharing, cryptographic hash function, and information hiding. (C) 2008 SPIE and IS&T.