A general progressive secret image sharing construction method

Abstract

Classic secret image sharing (SIS) including polynomial-based SIS, visual secret sharing (VSS), linear congruence (LC)-based SIS and so on, generally has the shortcoming of “all-or-nothing”, which is mainly caused by that most of their ideas are borrowed from secret data sharing designed for data rather than image. Progressive secret image sharing (PSIS) has the feature that the more shadows the better recovered secret image quality. In this paper, we introduce a general PSIS construction method with no pixel expansion from classic “all-or-nothing” SIS. Based on our PSIS construction method, three PSIS algorithms with selective progressive thresholds are extended from classic SIS schemes, respectively. Experiments are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of our method in terms of illustrations and analyses.