Visual multi-secret sharing with friendliness

Visual secret sharing (VSS) was used in the literature to encode and decode secret images until visual multi-secret sharing (VMSS) was proposed. Distinctly, multiple secret images can be encoded or decoded at a time in VMSS; however, only one secret image can be done in VSS. In VMSS, secrets are encoded into noise-like shares which have finally been stacked altogether so as to disclose each of the secrets by specific operations, such as rotating, flipping and sliding. Though the noise-like shares can be decoded by those operations, it is just like a fly in the ointment since they are hard to manage, to recognize and even to stack orderly. Based on some researches about user-friendly VSS for generating meaningful shares, a new friendly VMSS scheme is presented in this paper for achieving two main goals. One is trying to encode multiple secrets at a time and the other is making the decoding process easy to manage. The experimental results prove that our proposed scheme does work.