General construction for XOR-based visual cryptography and its extended capability

A visual cryptography scheme (VCS) can be realized by Boolean operations OR and XOR, respectively. The monotone property of OR operation reduces the visual quality of recovered image. To overcome this problem, some advanced XOR based VCSs (VCSXOR) were further designed to provide some favorable features such as high contrast and good resolution. However, they are all confined to non-strong access structures. In this paper, we focus on strong access structures and propose a general construction of VCSXOR, which provides flexible sharing strategies, perfect reconstruction of secret image. Furthermore, a new region incrementing VCS based on XOR (RIVCSXOR) is presented, which exploits the proposed VCSXOR. Experimental results show that our schemes further enrich the application scenarios and outperform previous schemes significantly.