A Novel General (<i>n</i>, <i>n</i>)-Threshold Multiple Secret Images Sharing Scheme Based on Information Hiding in the Sharing Domain

Abstract

(k,n)-threshold secret image sharing (SIS) protects an image by dividing it into n shadow images. The secret image will be recovered as we gather k or more shadow images. In complex networks, the security, robustness and efficiency of protecting images draws more and more attention. Thus, we realize multiple secret images sharing (MSIS) by information hiding in the sharing domain (IHSD) and propose a novel and general (n,n)-threshold IHSD-MSIS scheme (IHSD-MSISS), which can share and recover two secret images simultaneously. The proposed scheme spends less cost on managing and identifying shadow images, and improves the ability to prevent malicious tampering. Moreover, it is a novel approach to transmit important images with strong associations. The superiority of (n,n)-threshold IHSD-MSISS is in fusing the sharing phases of two secret images by controlling randomness of SIS. We present a general construction model and algorithms of the proposed scheme. Sufficient theoretical analyses, experiments and comparisons show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Keywords

• secret image sharing
• multiple secret images sharing
• random element utilization model