Data hiding is a technique for sending secret information under the cover of the digital media. It is usually used to protect privacy and sensitive information when such information is transmitted via a public network. To date, high capacity remains one of the most important research aspects of data hiding. In this study, a new, turtle shell‐based data hiding scheme is proposed to improve embedding capacity further while guaranteeing good image quality. In the proposed, turtle shell‐based scheme, a reference matrix is composed and a location table is generated. Then, according to the reference matrix and the location table, each pixel pair is processed to conceal four secret bits. The experimental results indicated that the proposed scheme achieved higher embedding capacity and lower distortion of images than some existing schemes.

QR code is designed as machine readable symbol, which is widely used in various fields of life due to its large message capacity and fast decoding speed. However, as a public standard, it will give rise to the security issue when delivering sensitive information with QR code. To overcome this weakness, this paper explores the characteristic of QR code to propose an efficient secret hiding mechanism to protect the sensitive information within QR code. The secret message would be embedded into cover QR code based on (8, 4) Hamming code. The error correction capacity (ECC) of QR code would correct the errors produced in the secret embedding procedure, and the valid marked QR code would reduce people’s curious. Compared to the state-of-art works, the proposed scheme achieves a better performance on the aspects of secret payload and embedding efficiency.

This paper first proposes a generation algorithm of a stick insect matrix. Then, a novel reversible secret image sharing scheme based on the stick insect matrix is presented. With the help of our matrix, secret data can be embedded in a cover image to generate two meaningful shadows. It is worth mentioning that the stick insect structure of the proposed matrix can be extended according to the embedding rate of the secret data, meanwhile the generating rules of the stick insect matrix can guarantee optimal visual quality of the generated shadows. Moreover, our scheme also provides an authentication mechanism. The embedded secret data can be retrieved and the cover image can be recovered exactly after successful authentication of two shadows. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme provides excellent visual quality and good authentication ability.