Visual Secret Sharing Without Pixel Expansion

Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) is a powerful approach for protecting image sharing through unsecured computer network such as the Internet. Pixel expansion and bad image quality are the most common problems of this approach. Visual secret sharing technique is proposed for grayscale images to eliminate pixel expansion problem using image compression. The experimental results and security analysis illustrate that the proposed visual secret sharing technique leads to better results in terms of image security and quality together with pixel expansion's elimination. The obtained results showed that the accomplished image security is stronger than the security of the traditional secret sharing technique as the secret key encryption is associated with VSS approach.