Security of grayscale images by VSS with novel method of bit-plane slicing

Compared to traditional methods, Visual Secret Sharing methods for encryption help in achieving high levels of confidentiality and reliability. Secret sharing schemes are ideal for storing information that is highly sensitive and important. In this paper we introduce a novel method of creating shares of a grayscale image by first dividing the image into corresponding bitmaps. Creating bit-plane slices or bitmaps of a grayscale image provides an additional level of security to it. According to this approach, first the grayscale image is divided into 8 bitmaps and then 2 shares of every bitmap are produced; all the first shares are combined to generate final share 1 and all the second shares of every bitmap are combined to generate final share 2. For the reconstruction of original image final share 1 and final share 2 are combined.