Reversible secret image sharing with steganography and dynamic embedding

Abstract

ABSTRACTMany traditional steganography methods do not disperse and hide secret data smoothly over all the capacity of cover images. Rather, they severely modify part of the cover image(s) to embed secret data, which results in stego images that have poor visual quality. In addition, there are still some secret image‐sharing approaches that cannot reveal the secret image losslessly without pixel expansion or extra storage or restore distortion‐free cover image(s) if they use steganography. In this paper, a novel scheme, which is based on Shamir's (t, n)‐threshold scheme (1979) and Galois Field GF(28) and uses dynamic embedding and least significant bit construction, is proposed to solve the issues mentioned above. Our experimental results showed that the dynamic embedding performance in our scheme was satisfactory and that both the secret image and the cover image can be restored losslessly without pixel expansion or extra storage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.