Secret Image Sharing with Steganography and Authentication Using Dynamic Programming Strategy

In this paper, a method is proposed to protect a secret image by applying (t, n) threshold scheme. The proposed method first divides the pixels in a four-pixel block into two groups. The first group contains the pixels whose one bit is used to embed authentication data, and the second group consists of the other pixels. One bit of each pixel in the second group is modified to reduce the degradation causing from embedding the sharing information. For the pixels in the first group, the authentication value is transformed into another value, and the transformed value is embedded into pixels to alleviate the degradation. The transforming relations are found by applying dynamic programming strategy. According to the experimental results, stego images with good quality and high authentication capability can be obtained by using our proposed method.