A turtle shell-based visual secret sharing scheme with reversibility and authentication

Visual secret sharing (VSS), also called visual cryptography, allows a secret image to be divided into several shares and the secret image can only be recovered through the collaboration of the shares. Due to high security and low computational complexity, VSS has been widely used in secure communications. In this paper, we propose the first turtle shell (TS)-based VSS scheme that shares the secret information into two meaningful shares. Firstly, a TS reference matrix is established. Then, secret information is hidden in a cover image to construct two meaningful shares with the help of TS reference matrix. The hidden secret information can be extracted without distortion if both shares are gathered and the cover image can be correctly restored by solving the location conflict problem. Moreover, an invalid share can easily be detected by the proposed scheme. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme provides excellent visual quality and is superior to state-of-the-art VSS schemes.