A Novel (2, 3) Reversible Secret Image Sharing Based on Fractal Matrix

This article first proposes two types of three-dimensional (3D) fractal reference matrices. Then, a new reversible (2, 3) secret image sharing scheme based on a fractal matrix is presented. With the help of the fractal reference matrix, the secret data can be embedded in an original image to generate three meaningful shadow images. It is worth mentioning that these two types of fractal matrices are designed for different hiding capacity, meanwhile the characteristics of the fractal matrix can guarantee good visual quality of the generated shadow images. Moreover, we provide two authentication mechanisms according to different situations, one of the authentication mechanisms can achieve 100% ability cheat detection. When the authentication is passed, we only need two of the three shadow images to extract the correct secret data and perfectly restore the original image. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme provides excellent authentication ability and good visual quality.