Meaningful color image sharing without pixel expansion problem

Since Naor and Shamir introduced visual cryptography in 1994, studies have explored numerous secret sharing techniques. New ideas regarding image security, pixel expansion, and security of decrypting the secret have been proposed. Conventional secret image sharing methods suffer from pixel expansion problem. In addition, using noise-like shairing images could arouse the hackers' attention. In this study, we introduce a color secret sharing scheme to sovle these problems. In the prposed scheme, meaningful color sharing images are generated elegantly to have the same size as the secret image. Experimental results show that the problem of pixel expansion can be avoided and the original color secret image can be completely reconstructed by using the proposed method. Therefore, the proposed method can be used to improve the security for practical applications of color iamge sharing.