A novel perceptual secret sharing scheme

Abstract

In this paper, a novel perceptual secret sharing model namely PSS model is defined. Then, a general (1, k out of n) PSS scheme is proposed based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). The proposed model has a large number of valuable features that previous secret sharing schemes fail to have. Furthermore, the proposed PSS scheme satisfies P (l, k, n) threshold mechanism which means that no perceptual information of the secret data will be revealed when the number of shadows is less than l, the degraded perceptual quality will be recovered when the number of shadows is greater than or equal to l and less than k, the more shadows the better recovered perceptual quality will be. Lossless perceptual quality will be recovered when the number of shadows is greater than or equal to k and less than or equal to n that could control access for different owners. This property will be useful for prominent prevalence in real applications like pay-per-view videos, Pay-TV/Music and art-work image vending, video on demand (VOD), etc. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.