Essential secret image sharing approach with same size of meaningful shares

Abstract

Essential Secret Image Sharing (ESIS) is a method to decompose a secret image into two groups of shares, where one group is essential and the other group is non-essential. In this method, recovery of secret image is possible only if threshold number of shares along with all essential shares will be present. Existing state of art has some limitations such as different share size, complex computation, random pattern (meaningless) share, explicit codebook requirement, pixel expansion and constraint on image type. These limitations restrict the applications of the secret image sharing. In this paper, a novel approach of generating shares of similar size as that of the secret image has been proposed. The proposed “essential secret image sharing approach with same size of meaningful shares” (ESISMS) scheme produces meaningful shares based on bitwise XORing. This proposed approach resolves all the above stated issues and the advantages and applicability of this approach have been demonstrated by the theoretical analysis and experimental results.