Confidential Image Super-Resolution with Privacy Protection

Nowadays, people are getting used to upload images to a third party for post-processing, such as image denoising and super-resolution. This may easily lead to the disclosure of the privacy in the confidential images. One possible solution is to encrypt the image before sending it to the third party, the encrypted image can be easily detected by a malicious attacker in the transmission channel. We propose a confidential image super-resolution method named HSR-Net which firstly hide the secret image and then super-resolve it in the hidden domain. The method is composed of three important modules: image hiding module (IHM), image super-resolution module (ISM), and image revealing module (IRM). The IHM aims to encode secret image and hide it into a cover image to generate the stego image. The stego image looks similar to the cover image but contains the information of the secret image. The third party uses the ISM to perform image super-resolution on the stego image. The user can reveal the super-resolved secret image from the stego image. The proposed HSR-Net method has two advantages. It ensures that the third party cannot directly operate on the secret image, thus protecting the user’s privacy. Due to the similarity between the stego image and cover image, we can reduce the attacker’s suspicion to further improve the image security. The experimental results were tested on DIV2K dataset and Flickr2K dataset. The peak signal-to-noise ratios (PSNR) of IHM, ISM, and IRM are 38.81 dB, 28.91 dB, and 23.51 dB, respectively, which verify that the proposed HSR-Net method is able to achieve image super-resolution and protect user’s privacy simultaneouly.