Probabilistic visual secret sharing schemes for grey-scale images and color images

  • Authors:

  • Daoshun Wang;Feng Yi;Xiaobo Li

  • Affiliations:

  • Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNlist), Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China;Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNlist), Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China;Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E8

  • Venue:
  • Information Sciences: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme is an encryption technique that utilizes the human visual system in recovering the secret image and does not require any cryptographic computation. Pixel expansion has been a major issue of VSS schemes. A number of probabilistic VSS schemes with minimum pixel expansion have been proposed for binary secret images. This paper presents a general probabilistic (k,n)-VSS scheme for grey-scale images and another scheme for color images. With our schemes, the pixel expansion can be set to a user-defined value. When this value is 1, there is no pixel expansion at all. The quality of reconstructed secret images, measured by average contrast (or average relative difference), is equivalent to the contrast of existing deterministic VSS schemes. Previous probabilistic VSS schemes for black-and-white images can be viewed as special cases in the schemes proposed here.