Enhanced Difference Expansion for Secure Secret Sharing and Message Embedding in Digital Images

In today's highly digitalized world, concealing the presence of communication has become a significant concern due to the rapid rise in unauthorized data access through the public network. These challenges have driven the adoption of cryptographic techniques, which secure data by encrypting it. Since encrypted data can attract attention and risk unauthorized access, steganography provides a complementary method to secure communication discreetly. Steganography involves hiding confidential information within the data of digital files, offering security by concealing the very existence of communication, unlike encryption. This paper introduces a new technique that uses secret sharing and multiple stego generation to significantly increase the capacity for embedding larger volumes of hidden data. This approach overcomes the limitations of prior methods, which focused on differentiating neighboring pixels and thus allowed only a minimal number of embeddable pixels. The experimental results, showing a maximum Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 29.84 decibels (dB), demonstrate the proposed scheme's ability to produce high-quality stego images, surpassing the performance of existing methods.