Progressive secret image sharing scheme using meaningful shadows.

This paper proposes a novel secret image sharing scheme, which progressively hides a secret image into multiple different meaningful cover or host images by utilizing a magic matrix. The produced shadows are high visual quality, meaningful images that differ from each other. As a result, they are not easy to cause the suspicion by the attackers. Moreover, the secret image in the proposed scheme can be recovered progressively via different numbers of shadows. The more shadows used, the better the quality of the secret image. The experimental results demonstrate the aforementioned advantages of the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.