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Random grid-based threshold visual secret sharing with improved visual quality and lossless recovery ability

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Abstract

Visual secret sharing (VSS) by random grids (RG) has gained much attention since it avoids the pixel expansion problem as well as requires no basic matrixes design. However, most of the previous RG-based threshold VSS still suffer from low visual quality or worse reconstructed secrets when more shadows are stacked. In this paper, a new RG-based threshold VSS with improved visual quality and lossless recovery ability is proposed. The random bits are utilized to improve the visual quality as well as to decrease the darkness of the reconstructed secret image. And the secret image can be losslessly recovered in the proposed scheme if the computational device is available. Simulation results and analyzes show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. In addition, this paper gave the preliminary definition and evaluation of progressive secret sharing (PSS) based on mathematical differential and expectations.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable discussions and comments. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 61471141, 61361166006, 61301099, 61472108, 61672186, 61501148,), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant Number: 2016YFB0800801), Key Technology Program of Shenzhen, China (Grant Number: JSGG20160427185010977) and Basic Research Project of Shenzhen, China (Grant Number: JCYJ2015051351706561).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, 150080, Harbin, China

    Xin Liu, Shen Wang & Weizhe Zhang

  2. Modern Educational Technology Center, Harbin University of Science and Technology, 150080, Harbin, China

    Xin Liu

  3. Electronic Engineering Institute, 230037, Hefei, China

    Xuehu Yan

Authors
  1. Xin Liu
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  2. Shen Wang
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  3. Xuehu Yan
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  4. Weizhe Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xin Liu.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper is accepted under the title “Random grids-based threshold visual secret sharing with improved visual quality” in Proceeding of 15-th International Workshop on Digital-forensics and Watermarking (IWDW 2016).

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Liu, X., Wang, S., Yan, X. et al. Random grid-based threshold visual secret sharing with improved visual quality and lossless recovery ability. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 20673–20696 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-5482-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-5482-3

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