Abstract
In recent years, various visual secret sharing schemes have been proposed to protect digital images from malicious behavior with comprehensive properties such as (\(k, n\)) threshold, simple recovery, no pixel expansion, meaningful shadow images, alternative order of shadow images, and avoiding codebook design. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous secret sharing scheme achieves almost all the above properties. In this paper, a visual secret image sharing threshold scheme is proposed based on random grids and error diffusion. It has several performances to other schemes such as (\(k, n\)) threshold, simple computation (stacking recovery), alternative order of shadow images in recovery, no codebook design, and avoiding the pixel expansion problem. In addition, it has meaningful shadow images, at the price of possible degrading of images’ quality. Experiments are conducted to show the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme. Comparisons with previous approaches show the performances of the proposed scheme.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ullagaddi, V., Hassan, F., Devabhaktuni, V.: Symmetric synchronous stream encryption using images. Signal Image Video Process. 1–8 (2012). doi:10.1007/s11760-012-0416-z
Li, Li, El-Latif, A.A.A., Shi, Z., Niu, X.: A new loss-tolerant image encryption scheme based on secret sharing and two chaotic systems. Res. J. Appl. Sci. Eng. Technol. 4(8), 877–883 (2012)
Naor, M., Shamir, A.: Visual cryptography. In: Advances in Cryptography, Eurocrypt’94, pp. 1–12 (1995)
Yan, X., Wang, S., El-Latif, A.A.A., et al.: New approaches for efficient information hiding-based secret image sharing schemes. Signal Image Video Process. 1–12 (2013). doi:10.1007/s11760-013-0465-y
Weir, J., Yan, W.Q.: A comprehensive study of visual cryptography. In: Transactions on DHMS V, LNCS 6010, pp. 70–105 (2010)
Wu, X.-T., Sun, W.: Image sharing scheme based on error diffusion. J. Comput. Appl. 31(1), 74–81 (2011)
El-Latif, A.A.A., Yan, X., Li, L., Wang, N., Peng, J.L., Niu, X.: A new meaningful secret sharing scheme based on random grids, error diffusion and chaotic encryption. Optics Laser Technol. 54, 389–400 (2013)
Ateniese, G., Blundo, C., Santis, A.D., Stinson, D.R.: Extended capabilities for visual cryptography. Theor. Comput. Sci. 250(1/2), 143–161 (2001)
Yang, C.: New visual secret sharing scheme using probabilistic method. Pattern Recogn. Lett. 25(4), 481–494 (2004)
Zhou, Z., Arce, G.R., Crescenzo, G.D.: Halftone visual cryptography. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 15(8), 2441–2453 (2006)
Wang, Z., Arce, G.R.: Halftone visual cryptography through error diffusion. In: ICIP, pp. 109–112 (2006)
Liu, F., Wu, C.: Embedded extended visual cryptography schemes. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 6(2), 307–322 (2011)
Lau, D.L., Arce, G.R.: Modern Digital Halftoning. Marcel Dekker, New York (2000)
Wang, D.-S., Zhang, L., Ma, N., et al.: Two secret sharing scheme based on Boolean operations. Pattern Recogn. 40(10), 2776–2785 (2007)
Kafri, O., Keren, E.: Encryption of pictures and shapes by random grids. Optics Lett. 12(6), 377–379 (1987)
Shyu, S.J.: Image encryption by random grids. Pattern Recogn. 40(3), 1014–1031 (2007)
Chen, T.H., Tsao, K.H.: Visual secret sharing by random grids revisited. Pattern Recogn. 42, 2203–2217 (2009)
Tsai, D.S., Chen, T.H., Horng, G.: On generating meaningful shares in visual secret sharing scheme. Imaging Sci. 56(1), 49–55 (2008)
Chen, T.-H., Tsao, K.-H., Yang, Y.-T.: Friendly color visual secret sharing by random grids. Fundam. Inf. 96, 61–70 (2009)
Chen, T.-H., Tsao, K.-H.: User-friendly random-grid-based visual secret sharing. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. 21(11), 1693–1703 (2011)
Chen, T., Tsao, K.: Threshold visual secret sharing by random grids. J. Syst. Softw. 84, 1197–1208 (2011)
Wu, X., Sun, W.: Improving the visual quality of random grid-based visual secret sharing. Signal Process. 93, 977–995 (2013)
Wang, Z., Arce, G.R.: Halftone visual cryptography via error diffusion. IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. 4(3), 383–396 (2009)
Yi, F., Wang, D., Li, S., Dai, Y.: Probabilistic visual cryptography scheme with reversing. J. Tsinghua. Univ. (Sci & Tech) 48(1), 121–123 (2008)
Yan, X., Wang, S., Li, L., El-Latif, A.A.A., Wei, Z., Niu, X.: A new assessment measure of shadow image quality based on error diffusion techniques. J. Inf. Hiding Multimed. Signal Process. (JIHMSP) 4(2), 118–126 (2013)
Gonzalez, R.C., Woods, R.E.: Digital Image Processing. Addison-Wesley Longman, Boston (2001)
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve this paper. The authors also thank Dr. Feng Liu and Dr. Zhongmin Wang for the valuable discussions and for providing their research demos. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos.: 61100187, 61301099, 61361166006), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No.: HIT. NSRIF. 2010046, HIT. NSRIF. 2013061), and Ministry of Scientific Research (Egypt-Tunisia Cooperation Program).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Yan, X., Wang, S., El-Latif, A.A.A. et al. Threshold visual secret sharing with comprehensive properties based on random grids. SIViP 9, 1659–1668 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-014-0619-6
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-014-0619-6