Abstract
A ( k , n ) threshold secret image sharing (SIS) method is proposed to divide a secret image into n shadows. The beauty of this scheme is that one can only reconstruct a secret image with k or more than k shadows, but one cannot obtain any information about the secret from fewer than k shadows. In the ( k , n ) threshold SIS, shadow authentication means the detection and location of manipulated shadows. Traditional shadow authentication schemes require additional bits for authentication; need much information to be public; or need to put each shadow into a host image, utilizing the information hiding technique, which makes the generation, recovery and authentication complexity higher. Besides, most existing schemes work when a dealer participates in recovery. Our contribution is that we propose a SIS method for a ( k , n ) threshold with dealer-participatory and non-dealer-participatory mutual shadow authentication capabilities which integrates polynomial-based SIS and visual secret sharing (VSS) through using the result of VSS to “guide” the polynomial-based SIS by a screening operation. In our scheme, when an authentication image is public, all involved actors (participants and dealer) can mutually authenticate each other by exchange the lowest level plane instead of the whole shadow. Our scheme is suitable for the case with and without a dealer participate recovery. In addition, the proposed scheme has characteristics of low generation and authentication complexity, no pixel expansion, 100% detection rate and lossless recovery.
Highlights
In a (k, n) threshold secret image sharing (SIS) scheme, where k ≤ n, a secret image is divided into n shadow images without any secret information leakage, and it can be reconstructed only when a sufficient number of shadow images are combined together, but one cannot obtain any information of the secret image from fewer than k shadow images
The beauty of visual cryptography scheme (VCS) is the stack-to-see property, which indicates the secret can be visually recognized by human visual system (HVS) just with sufficient shares stacking
It is remarkable that the k bits are utilized to gain the threshold mechanism in Step 2, and Step 3 is designed to improve the visual quality of reconstructed secret image by a different way to use the last n − k bits, through which the chance of covering b1, b2, · · ·, bk in the recovered t bits is improved
Summary
In a (k, n) threshold secret image sharing (SIS) scheme, where k ≤ n, a secret image is divided into n shadow images without any secret information leakage, and it can be reconstructed only when a sufficient number of shadow images are combined together, but one cannot obtain any information of the secret image from fewer than k shadow images. There are three roles, namely, dealer, participant and combiner, in a secret image sharing scheme. Yang et al [20] presented a novel approach which is based on a symmetric bivariate polynomial without needing parity bits Their (k, n) steganography and authenticated image sharing (SAIS) scheme provides better visual quality and has a higher detection ratio. Yan et al.’s work cleverly integrates polynomial-based SIS and visual secret sharing They utilize (2, 2) RG-VSS to split every pixel of authentication image into two temporary bits. We propose a (k, n) threshold SIS authentication with dealer-participatory and non-dealer-participatory mutual shadow authentication capabilities which integrates polynomial-based SIS and visual secret sharing (VSS) through using the result of VSS to “guide”the polynomial-based SIS.
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