Adaptive image sharing based on the quadri-directional search strategy with meaningful shadows

Abstract

Image sharing is a technique that is used to protect the security of a secret image by placing it into shadows. In this paper, we propose a new image sharing scheme based on the quadri-directional search strategy with meaningful shadows. In the proposed scheme, a modulus reference table is generated and used to share different sizes of the secret image. By doing so, the proposed scheme can preserve the high image quality of the shadows. In the secret image recovery phase, we can reconstruct the secret and cover images losslessly. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme can share different sizes of secret images while maintaining good image quality of the shadows. Compared with some previous image sharing schemes, the proposed scheme provides better performance in both embedding capacity and image quality. The proposed scheme also achieves higher embedding capacity than some previous reversible data hiding schemes while keeping small distortion in the shadows.