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New approaches for efficient information hiding-based secret image sharing schemes

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Abstract

In recent years, various secret sharing schemes for digital images have been developed in order to promote communication security. Previous methods in the literature have made efforts to achieve the merits properties for a good secret image sharing scheme such as implement (\(k,n)\) threshold, simple recovery, no pixel expansion, the generated shadow images are meaningful, the order of shadow images is alternative and lossless recovery of the secret image. To the best of our knowledge, no previous secret sharing scheme achieves all the above properties with good quality of meaningful shadow images. In this paper, we propose two different secret image sharing schemes, (\(n_1 ,n_1 )\) and (\(k,n_2 )\) thresholds, based on information hiding theory to improve the quality of meaningful shadow images with lower computation and good expansibility. In addition, the proposed schemes have the advantages of lossless and alternative order recovery and no pixel expansion. Comparisons with previous approaches show the performance of the proposed schemes.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve this paper. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 61100187) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Number: HIT. NSRIF. 2010046, HIT. NSRIF. 2013061).

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Correspondence to Shen Wang.

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Yan, X., Wang, S., Abd El-Latif, A.A. et al. New approaches for efficient information hiding-based secret image sharing schemes. SIViP 9, 499–510 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-013-0465-y

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