A Meaningful Scheme for Sharing Secret Images Using Mosaic Images

Secret image sharing (SIS) technique protects an image by sharing it among many users. Most existing SIS schemes produce meaningless shadow images, which tends to cause attackers’ suspicion. In this paper, a meaningful secret image sharing scheme is proposed that, for the first time, uses mosaic images as the shadow images. The secret image is divided into several parts, and each part is transformed into a mosaic image according to a host image. The indices of the secret tiles of the mosaic image are permuted according to the secret key, and they are hidden in the mosaic images to provide security for the SIS scheme. The experimental results showed that the proposed SIS scheme can reconstruct the original secret image and provide high security.