Secret image sharing with smaller shadow images

Secret image sharing is a technique for protecting images that involves the dispersion of the secret image into many shadow images. This endows the method with a higher tolerance against data corruption or loss than other image-protection mechanisms, such as encryption or steganography. In the method proposed in this study, the difference image of the secret image is encoded using Huffman coding scheme, and the arithmetic calculations of the sharing functions are evaluated in a power-of-two Galois Field GF(2t). Experiment results show that each generated shadow image in the proposed method is about 40% smaller than that of the method in [Thien, C.C., Lin, J.C., 2002. Secret image sharing. Comput. Graphics 26 (1), 765–770], which improves its efficiency in storage, transmission, and data hiding.