Meaningful visual secret sharing based on error diffusion and random grids

Random grid (RG) is an efficient method of eliminating the drawback of pixel expansion problem in visual secret sharing (VSS). Error diffusion (ED) technique is a brilliant method that improves the diffusion performance in an image by reducing the pattern noise and removing boundary and ’blackhole’ effects. In this paper, a novel meaningful RG-ED-based VSS, which encodes the (k, n) threshold into meaningful shadow images, is proposed at the price of not-clear recovered images. In addition, the novel scheme realizes the (k, n) threshold, avoids the design of complex codebook and averts the pixel expansion problem. Furthermore, the proposed RG-ED-based VSS inherits conventional benefits of VSS without the need of cryptographic efforts to decode the secret. Compared with other schemes reported in the literature, the present scheme has the benefits mentioned above, at the price of possible degrading of recovered images’ quality.

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