A Sudoku-based Secret Image Sharing Scheme with Reversibility (Invited Paper)

Abstract

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">A common drawback of the image sharing with steganography approaches is that the revealed secret image is distorted due to the truncation of the grayscale secret image. To lossless reveal the secret image in the (<em>t</em>, <em>n</em>)- threshold, we provide a novel sharing scheme in this article. Moreover, the original host image can be recovered by the embedded shadow images. To accomplish the above purposes, the proposed scheme derives the secret shadows and generates the meaningful shadow images by adopting the sudoku. In the new scheme, the sudoku grid is setting to 16</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: SymbolMT;"></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">16 and divided into sixteen 4</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: SymbolMT;"></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">4 blocks. Thus, we can embed 4</span><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: SymbolMT;"></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">(<em>t</em>-1) secret bits into each pixel pair of the host image. Besides, the embeddable secret capacity can be improved according to the threshold <em>t </em>in the (<em>t</em>, <em>n</em>)-threshold sharing system. The experiments show that the shadows can be successfully camouflaged in the host image with satisfactory quality. The distortion of the embedded host pixels is limited within range [0, 3]. Moreover, the proposed scheme provides a large capacity for embedded secret data. </span></span></span></p&gt

Secure image sharing method over unsecured channels

“…In other works, Chang et al [4] proposed a novel image sharing scheme using a 16 × 16-sized Sudoku puzzle as a share grid generator. The experiments showed that the shares can be successfully camouflaged in the host image with satisfactory quality.…”

“…Secret image sharing (SIS) has been widely studied in the past decade [1,4,16,20,28]. In SIS, the secret image is divided into a number of arbitrary image shares (say k), which are distributed to different users.…”

Quadri-directional searching algorithm for secret image sharing using meaningful shadows

“…Later then, Chang et al [14] and Wang et al [15] also employ Sudoku matrix to secret image sharing topic in order to enhance the security of secret sharing scheme by generating meaningful shadows.…”

Anti-cropping digital image watermarking using Sudoku

“…Retrieving requires a pairing of at least two shadow images. This is also done in the work of Chang et al (2010) with lossless recovery of the embedded secret. Yet another extension to the 'shadowSudoku' technique is done by Roshan et al (2009) by extending the work to use pairs from colour images (e g. red and green components) and, use 27 x 27 reference matrix instead of 256 x 256.…”