User-friendly secret image sharing scheme with verification ability based on block truncation coding and error diffusion

Abstract

Conventional secret image sharing schemes, which are constructed based on Shamir’s method, often suffer from random-liked shares, lossy reconstruction and high computation complexity. In addition, their generated shares are generally in original image format which may lead to more storage and suspicion from invaders. In this paper, we propose a user-friendly secret image sharing scheme based on block truncation coding (BTC) and error diffusion, where meaningful shares can be directly generated without any extra process. The meaningful shares by the proposed scheme are in BTC-compressed format which can reduce the capacity of transfer and storage. In the reconstructing phase, the secret image can be losslessly reconstructed by performing XOR operations on bit planes of sufficient BTC-compressed shares. Further, the proposed scheme provides extra verification ability to identify cheaters and check false shares. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.