Implementation of TiOISSS with meaningful shadows and with an additional authentication image

• The proposed scheme implements TiOISSS with meaningful shadows.
• The proposed scheme uses additional authentication image, to enhance the security.
• Adaptive halftoning is used to improve the quality of decoded secret image.
• The proposed scheme demonstrates better quality and security.

Visual Cryptography Scheme (VCS) is a cryptographic technique for protecting secret images. The advantage of using VCS is that decoding can be done without use of any computations. Nevertheless, the reconstructed image has poor visual quality. Therefore, Two in One Image Secret Sharing Scheme (TiOISSS) was proposed which takes the advantage of VCS and provides good quality decoded images. However, the existing TiOISSS has security limitations as it is implemented only for noisy shadows. Hence, in this paper, modified TiOISSS is proposed and implemented for meaningful shadows. To enhance the security of the shares and prevent fake shares that may be introduced by hackers, an authentication image is shared along with the secret image. The quality of the reconstructed image is improved by using adaptive halftoning technique. Experimental results demonstrate the improved security and quality by the proposed scheme.