An XOR-based progressive visual cryptography with meaningful shares
Pei-Ling Chiu, Kai-Hui Lee · 2016
In progressive visual cryptography schemes, visual qualities of recovered images appear multi-level upgrade when the number of the stacked shares increases. For identifying noise-like shares that belong to different secret images, providing meaningful shares is necessary. Based on the XOR-ed operation, this study proposes a novel encryption approach to construct the user-friendly progressive visual cryptography with meaningful shares, denoted as (2, n)-XFPVCS. The major goals of the proposed construction include the following: (1) Propose a systematic encryption method. (2) Cope with pixel-expansion problem. (3) Provide a low computational complexity method for decryption process. (4) Give adjustability for tuning the visual quality of cover images in meaningful shares. (5) Eliminate residual traces in recovered images. (6) Reconstruct lossless secret images. Experimental results indicate that the proposed (2, n)-XFPVCS can accomplish the goals simultaneously.