Abstract

Conventional visual secret sharing (VSS) schemes hide secret images in shares that are either printed on transparencies or are encoded and stored in a digital form. The shares can appear as noise-like pixels or as meaningful images; but it will arouse suspicion and increase interception risk during transmission of the shares. Hence, VSS schemes suffer from a transmission risk problem for the secret itself and for the participants who are involved in the VSS scheme. To address this problem, we proposed a novel technique for steganography using a texture and also a natural-image-based VSS scheme (NVSS scheme) that shares secret images via various carrier media to protect the secret and the participants during the transmission phase. We contrive the texture synthesis process into steganography to hide secret messages. In comparison to using an existing cover image to hide messages, our algorithm hides the source texture image and embeds secret messages through the process of stenography. The natural shares can be photos or hand-painted pictures in digital form or in printed form. We also propose possible ways to hide the secret to reduce the transmission risk problem for the share. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is an excellent solution for solving the transmission risk problem for the VSS schemes.