Image sharing method for gray-level images

Highlights? Pixel expansion and lossy recovery are two unsolved problems in visual secret sharing. ? To improve the above problems, a new visual secret sharing method is proposed in this paper. ? The ideas of Hill cipher and random grid are used to construct the shared images. ? Experimental result shows that our method can effectively improve the pixel expansion and lossy recovery problems. In 1994, Naor and Shamir firstly proposed the concept of visual secret sharing. By using a codebook to encode a binary image into sharing images, nobody can obtain the original information from any one of the shared images unless superimposing all shared images. Although the above method can protect the security of the binary image, pixel expansion and lossy recovery are two unsolved problem. To improve the disadvantages mentioned above, a new image sharing method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method firstly use linear equations of Hill cipher to divide an image into several sub-images. Then the concept of the random grid is applied to the sub-images and to construct the shared images. Experimental result shows that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the above drawbacks.

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