An image-sharing method with user-friendly shadow images

This study presents a user-friendly image-sharing method for easier management of the shadow images. The sharing of images among several branches (distributed disks) using the proposed method has several characteristics: 1) fast transmission among branches; 2) fault tolerance; 3) a secure storage system; 4) reduced chance of pirating of high-quality images; and 5) most importantly, the provision to each branch manager an easy-to-manage environment (because each shadow image looks like a shrunken version of the original image). The current approach still has the small-size and channel-independent properties of our previous work, namely, the size of each shadow image is only 1/r of that of the original image, and any r shadow images can be used for restoration (the restored image is independent of which r shadow images are used).