“…The existing watermarking based authentication schemes [6,25,34,37,41] modify the original host image by embedding watermark into it, thereby resulting in the image quality degradation. Hence, in the past decade VC based authentication schemes [3,5,8,13,30,36,39] have gained a lot of attention as these schemes do not embed watermark into the host original image. The shares are constructed from the host image, and then these shares along with the authentication data or watermark are embedded into some other cover images which are transferred through the communication channels.…”