An extended secret sharing scheme for color images with fixed pixel expansion

An extended visual secret sharing scheme uses multiple innocent-looking cover images to hide a secret image such that none discloses any portion of the secret. In this article an extended secret sharing technique is proposed that shares a secret color image in a couple of significant images using a fixed pixel expansion factor of 9 for a color space as large as comprising 2(24) colors. Further more, the data hiding technique employed in this paper uses all three planes of a color image which reduces the number of cover images that would otherwise be needed. Recovery is performed through a simple stacking (XOR) operation and a sequence of random integers.