An Enhanced Approach of Image Steganographic Using Discrete Shearlet Transform and Secret Sharing

Recently, the internet has made the users able to transmit the digital media in the easiest manner. In spite of this facility of the internet, this may lead to several threats that are concerned with confidentiality of transferred media contents such as media authentication and integrity verification. For these reasons, data hiding methods and cryptography are used to protect the contents of digital media. In this paper, an enhanced method of image steganography combined with visual cryptography has been proposed. A secret logo (binary image) of size (128x128) is encrypted by applying (2 out 2 share) visual cryptography on it to generate two secret share. During the embedding process, a cover red, green, and blue (RGB) image of size (512x512) is divided into three layers (red, green and blue). The blue layer is transformed using Discrete Shearlet Transform (DST) to obtain its coefficients. The first secret share is embedded at the coefficients of transformed blue layer to obtain a stego image. At extraction process, the first secret share is extracted from the coefficients of blue layer of the stego image and XORed with the second secret share to generate the original secret logo. According to the experimental results, the proposed method is achieved better imperceptibility for the stego image with the payload capacity equal to (1 bpp). In addition, the secret logo becomes more secured using (2 out 2 share) visual cryptography and the second secret share as a private key.