Two secret sharing schemes based on Boolean operations

Traditional secret sharing schemes involve complex computation. A visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme decodes the secret without computation, but each shadow is m times as big as the original. Probabilistic VSS solved the computation complexity and space complexity problems at once. In this paper we propose a probabilistic (2, n) scheme for binary images and a deterministic (n, n) scheme for grayscale images. Both use simple Boolean operations and both have no pixel expansion. The (2, n) scheme provides a better contrast and significantly smaller recognized areas than other methods. The (n, n) scheme gives an exact reconstruction. (c) 2006 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.