Information hiding in the sharing domain

Abstract

Secret image sharing (SIS) can divide a secret image into several shadow images for protection. Information hiding in the sharing domain (IHSD) fuses SIS and information hiding (IH) to simultaneously share any secret image and hide any information, and this technique can be applied in cloud computing, law enforcement and medical diagnoses. IHSD not only marks shadow images with information to prevent malicious tampering and for convenient management, search and identification but also enhances the robustness of IH. In this paper, we first introduce a formal definition of IHSD. Then, we describe a general IHSD model and algorithms with a concrete example in detail. In IHSD, we design the random element utilization model to control the random pixels generated from SIS. Then, we obtain shadow images with hidden information to realize SIS and IH simultaneously. The inputs of SIS with secret images, steganography and extra information in algorithms are without any limitations. Theoretical analyses, experiments and comparisons are presented to prove the effectiveness and feasibility of IHSD.