XOR-based visual cryptography scheme with essential shadows

Abstract

Visual cryptography scheme with essential shadows (EVCS) is of great significance since it provides different levels of the importance to shadows. In this paper, we propose a general construction method for (t, s, k, n)-VCS with essential shadows based on XOR operation ((t, s, k, n)-EXVCS), which originates from the partition of access structure. The secret image is encrypted into s essential shadows and n-s non-essential shadows. Any k shadows including at least t essentials can cooperate to decode the secret image and the decoding process is implemented by XOR operation on the involved shadows. Our scheme achieves perfectly reconstruction of secret image in the revealed image and the less size of shadows and revealed images. The experiments are conducted to testify the feasibility and practicability of the proposed scheme.