Secure mask for color image hidding

Hiding image in a color image is a very interesting research topic, especially using very popular software such as Microsoft Windows Paint, Internet Explorer browser (IE) Mozilla Firefox, etc can achieve very amazing result. In this paper, we start from the select operation of IE, and introduce the mechanism how to hide a color image in a real natural image. Based on this, we generate an animation using this scheme. Using the select function of IE, we can toggle two completely different animations. We improve the hiding scheme and introduce how to embed the shares of visual cryptography into a natural color image, another share of visual cryptography works as a public key like the select operation of IE. We also introduce how to hide a visual cryptography share into a halftone image. The results are very robust and can resist print and scan tempering.