A novel image protection scheme using bit-plane compression and secret sharing

It is quite a challenge to remember or privately store the key for encrypting the secret image. Moreover, the encrypted image may arouse the invaders' suspicion. In this paper, a novel secret image sharing scheme with additional steganography and repairable capabilities is proposed using the bit-plane compression and Lagrange interpolation formula. The proposal suggests the user to select an ostensible image, for example, a famous character image, as the cover image to camouflage his secret image to enhance the security. Specifically, a protected image is divided into three shares and hidden in the cover image to create the meaningful shadow images. Then, three shadow images are distributed to three different devices, for example, the smartphone, the laptop, and the cloud storage. By collecting any two shadow images, the user can losslessly retrieve the original secret image and the cover image. In addition, the proposed scheme is easily repairable when the smartphone or laptop is lost. The system analysis shows that the proposal not only achieves theoretical information security, but also is technically practical.