A Novel Visual Multi-Secret Sharing Scheme Based on Folding-up Operation

The Visual multi-secret sharing (VMSS) scheme is characterized by encoding several secret images into a set of noise-like shares. Most existing VMSS methods have to distort shares to embed additional secret images. As a result, the quality of the decoded original secret image is degraded. This paper proposes a folding-up operation based VMSS scheme, which is able to encode one secret image and a group of tag images into shares. The secret image is revealed by stacking all shares, and folding up each chosen share discloses the tag image. The proposed scheme encodes tag images without affecting the quality of the reconstructed secret image. The quality of the decoded secret image is equal to that of the conventional Visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme. The superiority of the proposed method is experimental verified.