Improvements of image sharing with steganography and authentication

Recently, Lin and Tsai proposed an image secret sharing scheme with steganography and authentication to prevent participants from the incidental or intentional provision of a false stego-image (an image containing the hidden secret image). However, dishonest participants can easily manipulate the stego-image for successful authentication but cannot recover the secret image, i.e., compromise the steganography. In this paper, we present a scheme to improve authentication ability that prevents dishonest participants from cheating. The proposed scheme also defines the arrangement of embedded bits to improve the quality of stego-image. Furthermore, by means of the Galois Field GF(2), we improve the scheme to a lossless version without additional pixels. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.