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

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.