Ownership protection for progressive image transmission with reversible data hiding and visual secret sharing

Progressive transmission of multimedia can be commonly encountered in multimedia communications. In this paper, we develop the reversible data hiding and visual secret sharing schemes for ownership protection of digital images, which is suitable for meeting the characteristics of progressive image transmission (PIT). With progressive transmission, data can be partitioned into base and enhancement layers. For reversible data hiding, we consider carefully altering the difference values between base and enhancement layers in the color planes of progressively transmitted images. Moreover, visual secret sharing has integrated into proposed algorithm to guarantee the ownership of images. Simulation results with our schemes have demonstrated the better performances over relating methods, and the effectiveness for practical implementations with color images. Consequently, the ownership protection of progressively transmitted media can be retained, and original color image can be recovered.