A cost-effective encryption scheme for color images

EXTENDED VISUAL SECRET SHARING SCHEMES: IMPROVING THE SHADOW IMAGE QUALITY

Visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme is a perfectly secure method to divide a secret image into several noise-like shadow images by splitting a secret pixel into black and white subpixels. Unlike other secret sharing schemes, the VSS scheme can be easily decoded by the human visual sight when staking shadow images. However, noise-like shadows are unusual and suspected by censors when delivered by e-mail or fax. Also, noise-like shadows are difficult to identify and manage when distributed. The problem was solved by adding the extended capability, a meaningful shadow image, in the so-called extended visual secret sharing (EVSS) scheme. In this paper, we present a new EVSS scheme by using gray and white subpixels to represent the secret pixel. Our proposed scheme still has the capability of visually revealing the secret image by stacking shadow images without the help of hardware and complex computation. When compared to the previous EVSS scheme, our new scheme has less number of subpixels to represent a secret pixel and the clearer shadow images.

SECRET IMAGE SHARING: A BOOLEAN-OPERATIONS-BASED APPROACH COMBINING BENEFITS OF POLYNOMIAL-BASED AND FAST APPROACHES

In secret image sharing, a polynomial interpolation technique heavy experiences a computation load when the secret image is retrieved later. To the contrary, fast approaches often need larger storage space due to pixel expansion property. This paper proposes a missing-allowable (k, n) scheme which is fast and with a reasonable pixel expansion rate (per). The scheme generates n extremely-noisy shadow images for the given secret color image A, and any k out of these n shadows can recover A loss-freely. In average, to decode a color pixel of A, the retrieval uses only three exclusion-OR operations among 24-bit numbers. Hence, the new method has very fast decoding speed, and its pixel expansion rate is always acceptable (0 < per < 2).