Transmission risk reduction in image sharing scheme with diverse image media

On transparencies or are encoded and stored in a digital form, conventional visual secret sharing (VSS) schemes hide secret images in shares that are either printed. But it will arouse suspicion and increase interception risk during transmission of the shares, the shares can appear as noise-like pixels or as meaningful images. For the secret itself and for the participants who are involved in the VSS scheme, VSS schemes suffer from a transmission risk problem. To protect the secret and the participants during the transmission phase, to address this problem, we proposed a natural-image based VSS scheme that shares secret images via various carrier media. The proposed (n, n) - NVSS scheme can share one digital secret image over n - 1 arbitrary selected natural images and one noise-like share. In digital form or in printed form, the natural shares can be photos or hand-painted pictures. The noise-like share is generated based on these natural shares and the secret image. Thus greatly reducing the transmission risk problem, the unaltered natural shares are diverse and innocuous. We also propose possible ways to hide the noise like share to reduce the transmission risk problem for the share. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is an excellent solution for solving the transmission risk problem for the VSS schemes.