Refining image steganography distribution for higher security multimedia counting-based secret-sharing

Counting-based secret sharing is becoming a vital efficient multimedia technique for raising the security of sensitive data especially when collective access to data are essential. Secret sharing distributes shares to participants forcing their joint availability in order to give permission. The share keys of the system deserve to be remembered and highly protected against intruders, presenting a challenging issue, noticing that shares are normally produced without giving participants any preference. Therefore, this research adds image steganography technique to the counting-based secret-sharing system to gain more applicable security. The paper proposes redistribution of LSB image steganography to embed share keys in colour cover image. The proposed method ensured that the shares hiding locations differ within cover images to increase the level of security. The paper analysis show that stego-image quality and security is attractive. It showed interesting results in terms of performance and payload capacity motivating this research to be a direction for coming improvements.