A Novel Threshold Changeable Secret Image Sharing Scheme

Abstract

In secret image sharing, the image is divided into several stego images, which are managed by corresponding participants. The secret image can be recovered only when the number of authorized participants is no less than the threshold. Thus, it is widely used to protect essential images, such as engineering drawings and product design drawings. In the traditional secret image sharing scheme, the threshold is fixed and unique. However, in practice, the security policy and the adversarial structure may change; therefore, the threshold must be adjusted dynamically. In this paper, we propose a novel secret image sharing scheme with a changeable threshold capability. Our scheme eliminates the limit of the changeable threshold and reduces the computation required. Also, our scheme is the first threshold changeable secret image sharing scheme that can recover an undistorted cover image. The theoretical analysis shows that our scheme is safe even if the threshold is changed. The experiments demonstrated that the stego image generated by our algorithm has better quality than other changeable-threshold, secret image sharing algorithms.