A novel weighted visual cryptography scheme with high visual quality

Visual Cryptography (VC) has been developed to encode a secret image into n shares for n participants in the past decades, in which each share is treated with the same priority. However, the privilege for participants in a group is not always the same. In this paper, a weighted visual cryptography scheme is proposed such that each participant obtains her/his share with different weight according to the different group of predefined privilege. The secret can be disclosed only if stacking predefined k or more shares in which containing predefined some specific shares from the specific groups. Otherwise, no information about the secret can be revealed. It is worthwhile to note that the higher value of total weight of stacking shares; the more information about the secret revealed from the stacked result. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme does work.