Meaningful shadows for image secret sharing with steganography and authentication techniques

In this paper, we proposed a lossless secret sharing scheme using a steganography technique to improve the performances of Lin and Tsai's as well as Yang et al.'s schemes. To ensure the reconstructed image is the true secret image, an authentication mechanism is imported into the proposed scheme to verify whether all the shadows are validated before reconstructing the secret image. In comparison with Lin and Tsai's and Yang et al.'s schemes, our proposed scheme delivers much more effective performances.