Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A secure image sharing scheme with high quality stego-images based on steganography

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Image sharing can be utilized to protect important commercial, military or private images against a single point of failure. Many existing image sharing schemes may have one or more of the security weaknesses as follows: First, noise-like image shares may easily arouse the attackers’ attention; Second, cheating in the recovery of the secret image cannot be prevented effectively; Third, the requisite size of cover images may be very large; Finally, poor quality of the stego-images may lessen camouflage effects. In this paper, a novel secure image sharing scheme with high quality stego-images is proposed. With the use of LOCO-I compression as a preprocessing approach, the statistical correlations between neighboring pixels of a secret image drop significantly, which may greatly enhance the visual security of the proposed scheme. And the necessary size of cover images is reduced. Moreover, the PSNR values of stego-images are much higher than the related works. In order to detect three kinds of deception during secret image reconstruction, the hash-based message authentication codes of an image share, the value of argument x and the identity ID of a participant are embedded into a cover image together with the image share. In addition, the application of dynamic embedding with a random strategy further enhance the security of our scheme.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Alvarez G, Hernández Encinas L, Martín del Rey A (2008) A multisecret sharing scheme for color images based on cellular automata. Inf Sci 178(22):4382–4395. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2008.07.010

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  2. Blakley G (1979) Safeguarding cryptographic keys. In: Proceedings of national computer conference (AFIPS1979), vol 48, pp 313–317

  3. Chan CK, Cheng LM (2004) Hiding data in images by simple LSB substitution. Pattern Recogn 37(3):469–474

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Chan CS, Sung PE (2010) Secret image sharing with steganography and authentication using dynamic programming strategy. In: First International Conference on Pervasive Computing Signal Processing and Applications (PCSPA), pp 382–385. doi:10.1109/PCSPA.2010.98

  5. Chan CS, Lin CY, Lin YH (2012) Apply the modulus function to secret image sharing. International Journal of Innovative Computing Information and Control 8(1A):375–385

    Google Scholar 

  6. Chang CC, Hsieh YP, Lin CH (2008) Sharing secrets in stego images with authentication. Pattern Recogn 41(10):3130–3137

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  7. Chen CC, Wu WJ, Chen JL (2015) Highly efficient and secure multi-secret image sharing scheme. Multimedia Tools and Applications:1–16

  8. Eslami Z, Ahmadabadi J (2011) Secret image sharing with authentication-chaining and dynamic embedding. J Syst Softw 84(5):803–809

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Gloe T, Bhme R (2010) The ‘Dresden Image Database’ for benchmarking digital image forensics. In: Proceedings of the 25th symposium on applied computing (ACM SAC 2010), vol 2, pp 1585–1591

  10. Guo C, Chang CC, Qin C (2012) A hierarchical threshold secret image sharing. Pattern Recogn Lett 33(1):83–91

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Hsieh SL, Tsai IJ, Yeh CP, Chang CM (2011) An image authentication scheme based on digital watermarking and image secret sharing. Multimedia Tools and Applications 52(2–3):597–619

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Islam N, Puech W, Hayat K, Brouzet R (2011) Application of homomorphism to secure image sharing. Opt Commun 284(19):4412–4429

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Jin J, hong Wu Z (2012) A secret image sharing based on neighborhood configurations of 2-D cellular automata. Opt Laser Technol 44(3):538–548

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Khosravi M, Naghsh-Nilchi A (2014) A novel joint secret image sharing and robust steganography method using wavelet. Multimedia Systems 20(2):215–226

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Lee CW, Tsai WH (2012) A secret-sharing-based method for authentication of grayscale document images via the use of the PNG image with a data repair capability. IEEE Trans Image Process 21(1):207–218

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  16. Li P, Kong Q, Ma Y (2014) Image secret sharing and hiding with authentication based on PSNR estimation. Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing 5(3):353–366

    Google Scholar 

  17. Lin CC, Tsai WH (2004) Secret image sharing with steganography and authentication. J Syst Softw 7(3):405–414

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Lin PY, Chang CC (2011) Cheating resistance and reversibility-oriented secret sharing mechanism. IET Inf Secur 5(2):81–92

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Naor M, Shamir A (1995) Visual cryptography. In: Advances in cryptology - EUROCRYPT’94, Perugia, Italy, LNCS, vol 950, pp 1–12

  20. Shamir A (1979) How to share a secret. Commun ACM 22(11):612–613

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Thien CC, Lin JC (2002) Secret image sharing. Comput Graph 26(5):765–770

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Ulutas G, Ulutas M, Nabiyev VV (2013) Secret image sharing scheme with adaptive authentication strength. Pattern Recogn Lett 34(3):283–291

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  23. Wang RZ, Su CH (2006) Secret image sharing with smaller shadow images. Pattern Recogn Lett 27(6):551–555

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Weinberger M, Seroussi G, Sapiro G (2000) The LOCO-i lossless image compression algorithm: Principles and standardization into JPEG-LS. IEEE Trans Image Process 9(8):1309–1324

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Wu CC, Kao SJ, Kuo WC, Hwang MS (2008) Enhance the image sharing with steganography and authentication. In: Proceedings of international conference on intelligent information hiding and multimedia signal processing (IIHMSP’08). Harbin, China, pp 1177–1181

  26. Yang CN, Chu YY (2011) A general (k, n) scalable secret image sharing scheme with the smooth scalability. J Syst Softw 84(10):1726–1733

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Yang CN, Chen TS, Yua KH, Wang CC (2007) Improvements of image sharing with steganography and authentication. J Syst Softw 80(7):1070–1076

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Yuan HD (2014) Secret sharing with multi-cover adaptive steganography. Inf Sci 254:197–212

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. This work was partially supported by the 973 Program (No. 2014CB360501), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1135004 and No. 61170080), Guangdong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (No. 2014A030308006), and Guangdong Province Universities and Colleges Pearl River Scholar Funded Scheme (2011).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Centre, Guangzhou, 510006, People’s Republic of China

    Junhui He, Weiqiang Lan & Shaohua Tang

Authors
  1. Junhui He
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Weiqiang Lan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Shaohua Tang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Junhui He.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

He, J., Lan, W. & Tang, S. A secure image sharing scheme with high quality stego-images based on steganography. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 7677–7698 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3429-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3429-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation