A secure image delivery scheme with regional protection capability using image inpainting and editing

Abstract

In this paper, a secure image delivery scheme that can protect the privacy of secret region in the transmitted image is proposed. The secret region that requires protection is firstly analogised as the repairing and cloning region in the problems of image inpainting and editing. By inpainting and modified Poisson editing, the original protection region can effectively be concealed or disguised with other meaningful content. In the modified Poisson editing process, the twice Laplacian operator is used to improve the seamless transition on the boundary of protection region. The bits generated by the original content of the region are then reversibly embedded into the inpainted or disguised image to form the final protected image. The protected image can be delivered in channels securely, and the attacker cannot obtain the real content of the image without the keys. Experiments were conducted to show the effectiveness and security of the scheme.

Keywords:

• image delivery
• regional protection
• image inpainting
• image editing
• data hiding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (60872116, 60832010, and 61073190), the Shanghai Rising-Star Program (10QH14011), the Key Scientific Research Project of Shanghai Education Committee (10ZZ59), and the Shanghai Specialized Research Foundation for Excellent Young Teacher in University (slg09005).