Progressive quality access through secret sharing and data hiding scheme

This paper proposes a joint secret sharing and data hiding scheme to serve the purpose of progressive quality access control on digital images. A gray scale secret image is divided into noise-like shares using bit plane modulation. Individual share is then embedded into respective cover images (from a set of images) in DCT domain using m-ary spread spectrum modulation. This joint data hiding and secret sharing scheme is analogous to as (k, n) scheme in secret sharing; however progressive quality access control of the secret is possible to achieve based on the particular group of users involved in decoding process. Robustness of the proposed method is also studied against a set of common signal processing operations. Extensive simulation results are also shown to validate the efficacy of the proposed method.