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Sharing and hiding a secret image in color palette images with authentication

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Abstract

Existing secret image sharing (SIS) schemes with steganography and authentication are only suitable for uncompressed grayscale images. To make it more practical, a scheme for sharing and hiding a secret image in color palette images with authentication is proposed in this paper. Three commonly used system color palettes are considered. In sharing phase, a secret image is encoded into shared bits by polynomial based SIS. The shared bits are concealed into the color palette cover image to form the stego images. Meanwhile, the authentication parity bits are generated and embedded as well. Two embedding strategies are developed for the color palette images. In authentication and recovery phase, the integrity of each stego image is verified. Then, the secret image are reconstructed by sufficient authentic stego images. Experimental results are demonstrated to show the effectiveness and merits of the proposed scheme.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61972179 and 61602211), Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (Grant No. 2020A1515011476), Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou, China (Grant No. 201707010259), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and Ministry of Science and Technology, under Grant MOST 108-2221-E-259-009- MY2 and 109-2221-E-259-010.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

    Xiaotian Wu

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan

    Ching-Nung Yang & Yi-Yun Yang

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  1. Xiaotian Wu
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  2. Ching-Nung Yang
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  3. Yi-Yun Yang
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Correspondence to Xiaotian Wu.

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Wu, X., Yang, CN. & Yang, YY. Sharing and hiding a secret image in color palette images with authentication. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 25657–25677 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09253-2

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