A Visual Secret Sharing Scheme for Progressively Restoring Secrets

Visual secret sharing has received more and more attention over the past years due to the fact that neither complex computation nor cryptographic knowledge is required to decrypt the secret image directly according to the characteristics of the human vision system. Considering the issue of sharing the secret image at multiple image resolutions with the meaningful shadows, in this paper, we present a friendly progressive visual secret sharing scheme without expanding the image size in the shadows and the reconstructed secret image based on applying a 2x2-sized block-wise operation to generate the shadows block by block. The proposed method can achieve these benefits： 1） the generated shadows are meaningful, and their sizes are not expanded, and 2） the secret image can be recovered at different resolutions by stacking different quantities of shadows together. The experimental results also show that the proposed method is superior to other compared schemes.