Progressive Hartley image secret sharing for high-quality image recovery

This paper introduces a highly efficient approach for progressive image secret sharing through the Discrete Hartley Transform (DHT), offering distinct advantages over existing methods. Leveraging DHT in the color domain, our approach achieves progressive sharing of color images while maintaining robustness and minimal visual impact. By optimizing quantization table selection, our method focuses on maximizing image recovery fidelity. Our extensive experiments showcase the efficacy of our proposed method, highlighting its potential for secure image sharing and superior image quality enabled by the real-number DHT transformation. Notably, our approach demonstrates strong security robustness and high-quality image reconstruction through histogram analysis. Objective assessment values of 88.106 (PSNR), 0.884 (NCC), 0.095 (NAE), and 0.895 (SSIM) underscore the superiority of our method. These results, coupled with its unique contributions and key factors, position our work as a promising solution in the field of image security and distribution, motivating further exploration and inspiring related research endeavors.