A high quality image sharing with steganography and adaptive authentication scheme

► We enhance the image quality under various authentication bits conditions. ► The proposed scheme has improved the image quality by 4.71%, 9.29%, and 11.10%. ► The efficacy of authentication capability of the proposed scheme is demonstrated. ► The authentication ability is maintains while enhances the image quality. With the rapid growth of numerous multimedia applications and communications through Internet, secret image sharing has been becoming a key technology for digital images in secured storage and confidential transmission. However, the stego-images are obtained by directly replacing the least-significant-bit planes (LSB) of cover-images with secret data and authentication code in most schemes, which will result in the distortion of the stego-images. In this paper, we proposed a novel secret image sharing scheme by applying optimal pixel adjustment process to enhance the image quality under different payload capacity and various authentication bits conditions. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme has improved the image quality of stego images by 4.71%, 9.29%, and 11.10%, as compared with the schemes recently proposed by Yang et al., Chang et al., and Lin and Tsai. We also provide several experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of authentication capability of the proposed scheme. In other words, our scheme maintains the secret image sharing and authentication ability while enhances the image quality.