Robust and progressive color image visual secret sharing cooperated with data hiding

This paper proposes a visual secret sharing scheme for color image encryption with robust and progressive decryption abilities. Robust decryption means the secret content can be still decrypted from shares even the shares are corrupted with intentional or unintentional alterations. In progressive decryption, three levels quality of secret images can be decrypted with the same shares. A lower visual quality secret content can be revealed by stacking shares. A halftone version of secret can be decrypted by simple XOR shares. Furthermore, a nearly lossless version of the secret content can be reconstructed by a decoding procedure. The method is cooperated with data hiding technique which has two functions, one is for encoding some secret content and the other is for embedding some extra information, e.g., permutation key. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.