High-capacity medical information hiding scheme with P-tensor product secret image sharing for wireless body area networks

Given the escalating demand for information transmission in the resource-restricted wireless body area networks (WBANs), securing medical data and minimizing energy consumption are paramount. We present an innovative information hiding scheme that employs P-tensor product secret image sharing (PTP-SIS) and multiple information-hiders for WBANs. Considering the remarkable compression performance demonstrated by compressed sensing (CS), as well as its link to Shamir's (k, n) secret sharing method, using CS rather than traditional secret sharing techniques for image processing purposes could potentially help alleviate transmission burden of sensor nodes. However, utilizing CS to process high-dimensional signals poses a significant challenge due to the large dimensionality of the measurement matrix. The P-tensor product (PTP) is a tool that offers outstanding universality and can overcome the dimension limitations of traditional matrix multiplication, it is applied in the secret sharing stage. Moreover, applying the ideas of secret sharing leads to less stress on an individual device as well as lower communication spending, and multiple hiders have the ability to independently embed additional secrets into shadow images for efficient information backup. Theoretical analysis and experiments validate that the proposed scheme ensures information security and transmission efficiency while achieving superior image recovery performance and higher information embedding rates compared to other approaches.