Secret Image Sharing System Using Meaningful Covering Shares

Visual Cryptography facilitates hiding a secret image into n number of shares distributed to n number of participants. This kind of scheme is very useful as the participants in such security systems need not know the cryptographic knowledge in order to recover the secret image from the shares. This phenomenon is known as VCS (Visual Cryptography Scheme). An extended VCS is the one which is capable of generating meaningful shares when compared with the shares of the VCS. This paper proposes construction of EVCS by embedding the random shares (result of VCS) into covering images. The empirical results revealed that the proposed EVCS is more secure and flexible than the EVCSs found in literature. Keywords–VCS, random shares, covering shares, secret sharing