Secret image sharing scheme with hierarchical threshold access structure

•We propose a secret image sharing scheme with hierarchical threshold access structure.•The shares distributed among participants are meaningful images.•Our scheme overcomes the security weakness of the only existing scheme of the same type.•Our scheme recovers both of the secret and cover images losslessly.•The proposed scheme can detect tampering of shares.

A hierarchical threshold secret image sharing (HTSIS) scheme is a method to share a secret image among a set of participants with different levels of authority. Recently, Guo et al. (2012) [22] proposed a HTSIS scheme based on steganography and Birkhoff interpolation. However, their scheme does not provide the required secrecy needed for HTSIS schemes so that some non-authorized subsets of participants are able to recover parts of the secret image. In this paper, we employ cellular automata and Birkhoff interpolation to propose a secure HTSIS scheme. In the new scheme, each authorized subset of participants is able to recover both the secret and cover images losslessly whereas non-authorized subsets obtain no information about the secret image. Moreover, participants are able to detect tampering of the recovered secret image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms Guo et al.’s approach in terms of visual quality as well.