Image Secret Sharing and Hiding with Authentication Based on PSNR Estimation

In order to increase the security in storage and transmission, the secret image can be shared and hidden in ordinary cover images to form the stego images. Many image secret sharing schemes with steganography and authentication have been proposed. The qualification of the stego images can be verified. Unfortunately, each of these schemes has one or more drawbacks. First, the size of the stego images is large. Second, the visual quality of the stego images evaluated by the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is degraded too much. Third, the authentication ability is weak. To overcome such drawbacks, a new scheme based on PSNR estimation is proposed in this paper. The new scheme can optimize both the quality and the size of the stego images. In addition, the piecewise authentication method based on Hash function is introduced to improve the authentication ability. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of our scheme are confirmed by the experimental results.