Cropping and noise resilient steganography algorithm using secret image sharing

Abstract

This paper proposes an image steganography scheme, in which a secret image is hidden into a cover image using a secret image sharing (SIS) scheme. Taking advantage of the fault tolerant property of the (k,n)-threshold SIS, where using any k of n shares (k≤n), the secret data can be recovered without any ambiguity, the proposed steganography algorithm becomes resilient to cropping and impulsive noise contamination. Among many SIS schemes proposed until now, Lin and Chan’s scheme is selected as SIS, due to its lossless recovery capability of a large amount of secret data. The proposed scheme is evaluated from several points of view, such as imperceptibility of the stegoimage respect to its original cover image, robustness of hidden data to cropping operation and impulsive noise contamination. The evaluation results show a high quality of the extracted secret image from the stegoimage when it suffered more than 20% cropping or high density noise contamination.