A puzzle matrix oriented secret sharing scheme for dual images with reversibility

Abstract

Dual image reversible data hiding is a specialized research direction in the field of information security. Secret messages are embedded into the original image using an image signal processing algorithm for reversible data hiding. This process generates two share images, indistinguishable from the original image, and each distributed to different receivers. Only through collaboration between the receivers can the original image and secret message be fully recovered. A dual image reversible data hiding scheme is proposed based on a reference matrix. The pixel pairs from the two share images collaborate and result in embedding 6 bits using the puzzle matrix; thus, achieving an embedding rate of up to 1.5 bits per pixel. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers a high embedding capacity of up to 786,432 bits, good visual quality, and fast execution time. Compared to other state-of-the-art dual image reversible data hiding schemes, our advantage mainly lies in the larger embedding capacity. Compared with a previously proposed scheme with the same embedding capacity, our proposed scheme provides better visual quality and faster execution time.