A novel joint secret image sharing and robust steganography method using wavelet

Abstract In this paper a data hiding method is proposed based on the combination of a secret sharing technique and a novel steganography method using integer wavelet transform. In this method in encoding phase, first a secret image is shared into n shares, using a secret sharing technique. Then, the shares and Fletcher-16 checksum of shares are hidden into n cover images using proposed wavelet based steganography method. In decoding phase, t out of n stego images are required to recover the secret image. In this phase, first t shares and their checksums are extracted from t stego images. Then, by using the Lagrange interpolation the secret image is revealed from the t shares. The proposed method is stable against serious attacks, including RS and supervisory training steganalysis methods, it has the lowest detection rate under global feature extraction classifier examination compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. Experimental results on a set of benchmarks showed that this method outperforms conventional methods in offering a high secure and robust mechanism for joining secret image sharing and steganography.