A New Meaningful Adaptive Region Incrementing Visual Secret Sharing Based on Error Diffusion and Permutation Encoding with Cheating Prevention

Abstract

Visual secret sharing, or the so-called visual cryptography, is a well-known scheme that encrypts a secret image into several meaningless share images, usually printed on transparencies, and decrypts as stacking some or all share images by the human visual system. More and more researches about visual secret sharing and its applications have been recently proposed. Here a novel image sharing scheme is proposed to encode a secret into meaningful host images. It consists of Error Diffusion, Permutation Encoding, Steganography and Cheating Prevention. Since the secret images are grayscale images, we first apply EDBTC, then the secret image is encrypted based on permutation. Finally hide the shares created by adaptive region incrementing and cheating prevention algorithm into host images.