Image Error Concealment and Quality Access Control Based on Data Hiding and Cryptography

This paper proposes a scheme that integrates error concealment and quality access control of digital image(s) in a single platform. The objective is achieved by embedding some important information extracted from the original image itself, to introduce sufficient redundancy in the transmitted image. The data embedding is done by modulating integer wavelet coefficients using quantization index modulation (QIM). Before data embedding the important information is encrypted using chaotic logistic mapping. The necessary information in the form of the secret key (K) is further encrypted using a public key (P) cryptology for its secret transmission to the receiver. The user who has the knowledge of the secret key (K) can decrypt the hidden information for the concealment purpose, while the users having different partial knowledge of the key (K) enjoy relative qualities of the images by partial recovery of the damaged region. The simulation results have shown the validity of both the claims.