Journal of Shanghai University(Natural Science Edition) ›› 2020, Vol. 26 ›› Issue (1): 21-32.doi: 10.12066/j.issn.1007-2861.1997

• Research Articles • Previous Articles     Next Articles

(k,n) visual cryptography scheme based on XOR decryption

Songge GUO1, Donghui LYU1(), Yujing DAI1, Yanli REN1,2,3   

  1. 1. School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
    2. Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science, Shanghai 200444, China
    3. Key Laboratory of Scalable Computing and Systems, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240,China
  • Received:2018-01-16 Online:2020-02-28 Published:2020-03-22
  • Contact: Donghui LYU E-mail:dhlu@shu.edu.cn

Abstract:

Traditional visual cryptography schemes recover secret images by stacking shares directly. Since the stacking operation can be denoted by logical OR operation and since white pixels can't be fully recovered with these schemes, the decryption effect is not satisfactory. This paper proposes a (k,n) random grid-based visual cryptography scheme based on exclusive OR (XOR) decryption by using reflexivity of XOR for encryption and by applying the same color representation method as digital images. The secret images can be recovered in two situations: when computational devices are not available, the secret images can be recovered by stacking shares directly; when computational devices are available, the secret images can be recovered by XOR operation. With better visual quality, the secret images recovered this way can be lossless since all shares are collected. Compared with existing visual cryptography schemes, better visual quality is obtained with this new scheme.

Key words: image encryption, visual cryptography, random grid, XOR decryption, lossless recovery

CLC Number: