Exploring secret image sharing with embedding of shares

Protecting the confidentiality of information has become a significant issue in information security. Secret sharing is an important technique that helps to protect the confidentiality of information. A dealer divides a secret into several shares that are distributed among a group of participants. Each shadow does not leak any useful information about the secret and a specified number of participants must cooperate to reconstruct the original secret information. In secret sharing techniques original secret is restored from required number of shares. Using these schemes, a secure system in which the secret is not revealed from fewer than required shares can be realized. The created shares are meaningless. So, the unauthorized users may get their attention to such shares. A remedy approach is to provide meaningful cover to these meaningless shares. So, embedding of shares in cover image improves the confidentiality of the system. Researchers have proposed the share hiding schemes. This paper explores the secret sharing schemes with embedding of shares in cover images. The main focus is on payload and quality of reconstructed shares.