(k, n) threshold secret image sharing scheme based on Chinese remainder theorem with authenticability

In the traditional secret image sharing (SIS) scheme, the secret image is divided into several noise-like shares, which lack authentication and may attract the attention of malicious users. Therefore, the authenticability of shadow images may play an important role and is worthy of investigation. Traditional shadow authentication research requires additional image or additional bits for authentication, which may lead to high complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel (k, n) threshold SIS scheme that is based on the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) with shadow authenticability. Our contribution is that the secret grayscale image is distributed into n shadows, while each shadow image contains authentication information with QR code embedding. Our scheme can realize the 100% detection rate of fake participants when a credible control center is involved. The experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme has low shadow generation, authentication complexity, and the lossless recovery of secret image.