Verifiable XOR-based visual secret sharing scheme for hyperspectral images

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are the spectral images that provide spatial and spectral information. Unlike multispectral images, these images consist of 100 to 200 bands, which provide a large amount of data to identify minute details of the scene with the help of the spectral signatures. This information is valuable and should be secured while transmitting the HSI over the network. Visual cryptography is a well-known cryptographic method for securing images. It helps in securely transmitting images among n users. It converts visual data into unreadable shares that are transmitted and, stacking these shares together will reveal the image. Many visual secret sharing (VSS) schemes have been proposed in the past decade, which made it easier to hide the visual information from unauthorized users. We have proposed a verifiable XOR-based VSS method for the secure transmission of HSIs. We have introduced a preprocessing step for the image with a band selection technique, which reduces the size of the image and eliminates redundancy. It also includes the detection of the tampered shares. Embedding a verifiable bit in each pixel is performed to test the integrity of the shares. We have assessed the visual quality of the recovered image using quantitative measuring parameters. We also compared them with existing VSS methods. The proposed method recovers the HSI with a self-similarity index of 95% to 99%. The proposed method's experimental results show that the HSI is restored with better visual quality. (C) 2021 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)