Progressive sharing of multiple images with sensitivity-controlled decoding

Secure sharing of digital images is becoming an important issue. Consequently, many schemes for ensuring image sharing security have been proposed. However, existing approaches focus on the sharing of a single image, rather than multiple images. We propose three kinds of sharing methods that progressively reveal n given secret images according to the sensitivity level of each image. Method 1 divides each secret image into n parts and then combines and hides the parts of the images to get n steganographic (stego) JPEG codes of equal importance. Method 2 is similar; however, it allocates different stego JPEG codes of different ‘weights’ to indicate their strength. Method 3 first applies traditional threshold-sharing to the n secret images, then progressively shares k keys, and finally combines the two sharing results to get n stego JPEG codes. In the recovery phase, various parameters are compared to a pre-specified low/middle/high (L/M/H) threshold and, according to the respective method, determine whether or not secret images are reconstructed and the quality of the images reconstructed. The results of experiments conducted verify the efficacy of our methods.