Swarming with (Visual) Secret (Shared) Mission

Abstract

Collaborative secure image matching is a problem that is applicable in various domains, for both – data in rest and data in motion. The problem is defined as follows. There is a secret image, and a set of n mobile agents. The set of mobile agents should match (compare) an observed image to the original secret image. In this paper we discuss some of the existing approaches, and present an alternative solution applied and analyzed for different applications. The first application is a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) that search for a target specified by an image. The second application is a social network that serves as a smart storage device capable of performing distributed, secret image matching operations. Our solution is based on the well-known Visual Encryption Scheme (VES) and projections of visual bit maps rather than (quadratic complexity) messages exchange in implementing Secure Multi Party Computation (MPC) scheme. We present a perfect-information-theoretic secure solution for this problem. To keep the original image secrecy, at least k out of n mobile agents are required to retrieve any information about the original image.