Secret image sharing with steganography and authentication

A novel approach to secret image sharing based on a (k, n)-threshold scheme with the additional capabilities of steganography and authentication is proposed. A secret image is first processed into n shares which are then hidden in n user-selected camouflage images. It is suggested to select these camouflage images to contain well-known contents, like famous character images, well-known scene pictures, etc., to increase the steganographic effect for the security protection purpose. Furthermore, an image watermarking technique is employed to embed fragile watermark signals into the camouflage images by the use of parity-bit checking, thus providing the capability of authenticating the fidelity of each processed camouflage image, called a stego-image. During the secret image recovery process, each stego-image brought by a participant is first verified for its fidelity by checking the consistency of the parity conditions found in the image pixels. This helps to prevent the participant from incidental or intentional provision of a false or tampered stego-image. The recovery process is stopped if any abnormal stego-image is found. Otherwise, the secret image is recovered from k or more authenticated stego-images. Some effective techniques for handling large images as well as for enhancing security protection are employed, including pixelwise processing of the secret image in secret sharing, use of parts of camouflage images as share components, adoption of prime-number modular arithmetic, truncation of large image pixel values, randomization of parity check policies, etc. Consequently, the proposed scheme as a whole offers a high secure and effective mechanism for secret image sharing that is not found in existing secret image sharing methods. Good experimental results proving the feasibility of the proposed approach are also included. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.