Probabilistic Visual Secret Sharing Schemes for Gray-scale images and Color images

Abstract: Visual secrete sharing (VSS) is an encryption technique that utilizes human visual system in the recovering of the secret image and it does not require any complex calculation. Pixel expansion has been a major issue of VSS schemes. A number of probabilistic VSS schemes with minimum pixel expansion have been proposed for binary secret images. This paper presents a general probabilistic (k, n)-VSS scheme for gray-scale images and another scheme for color images. With our schemes, the pixel expansion can be set to a user-defined value. When this value is 1, there is no pixel expansion at all. The quality of reconstructed secret images, measured by Average Relative Difference, is equivalent to Relative Difference of existing deterministic schemes. Previous probabilistic VSS schemes for black-and-white images with respect to pixel expansion can be viewed as special cases of the schemes proposed here