High performance image steganography integrating IWT and Hamming code within secret sharing

Abstract Steganography and secret sharing are schemes to increase the security of private information against attackers. Steganography emphasizes secrecy while secret sharing distributes the secret key in shares that are conditionally classified to reconstruct the original secret. This paper introduces a counting‐based secret sharing scheme that aims to reduce the computational complexity for longer keys, thereby providing a practical steganographic approach for efficient sharing. The scheme integrates counting‐based secret sharing with integer wavelet transform (IWT) and steganography. The subscriptions created using the Hamming code are embedded in the cover image. Using this method, IWT significantly reduces the occurrence of common rounding errors. As a result, secret key extraction becomes very accurate and eliminates the need to access the original images. This design, using secret sharing based on counting, not only has simplicity and efficiency, but also features such as flexibility, scalability, and lack of central authority. In addition, high‐quality steganography was obtained for keys with lengths of 64, 256, 512, 1024, and 3072, showing an average PSNR=80.11 in different color images. This outstanding performance makes it a highly efficient alternative to previous designs, representing a groundbreaking contribution with significant public interest in the field.