A lightweight authenticable visual secret sharing scheme based on turtle shell structure matrix

This paper proposes a novel visual secret sharing scheme based on a turtle shell structure matrix (TSSM) with reversibility and lightweight authentication. With the assistance of TSSM, the secret data is embedded into the original cover image and three meaningful shadow images are generated. To increase the image quality of the generated shadows, the proposed scheme designs an embedding structure that will be used to embed a secret image into shadows based on the TSSM, rather than by directly embedding authentication codes. The designed embedding structure offers a robust authentication capability at the cost of lightweight computation. Moreover, the hidden secret data can be extracted completely and the cover image can be restored losslessly through the collaboration of the three received shadows. Experimental results, on various grayscale test images, confirmed that our proposed scheme provides high visual quality and excellent authentication.