Performance Evaluation and Future Scope of Image Secret Sharing Schemes

Abstract

Image secret sharing (ISS) has seen an immense growth in modern day world due to excess internet usability along with growing insecurity due to advanced attacks from the hackers. Secret sharing methods play a very important part in visual cryptography(VC) which began with introduction of “(k, n) threshold” scheme introduced by Shamir and Blakeley in 1979. In this scheme a secret is divided/encoded into ‘n’ shares or meaningless noisy images. The message to be hidden can only be constructed by stacking (combining with some logic) up at least ‘k’ number of shares/transparencies. Various advancements have happened in ISS with introduction of the “(k, n) threshold” based scheme to images. It has led to development of new schemes like probability based ISS, extended ISS, ISS using Cloud, and progressive ISS with perfect reconstruction capability or perfect data retrieval capability etc. These techniques are judged using the parameters like security robustness, pixel expansion and contrast of retrieved image. The ISS schemes can be made more robust and secure by integrating various features like introducing progressive ISS feature with Cloud and further increasing data payload by increasing ability to embed more data without decreasing the security and quality of retrieved original secret data. In this paper different ISS schemes have been surveyed and compared taking into consideration security, pixel expansion and contrast loss along with future scope of these techniques and application areas have also been discussed to get the scope of future research in the area.