Visual secret sharing schemes (VSSS, for shortness) were introduced in 1995 [1]. They form a particular case of secret sharing schemes with the additional restriction that allowed (also called privileged or trusted in access structure) coalitions can recover the secret by visual means.
More precisely, consider the case when just one bit of visual information, i.e., a black or white pixel, has to be distributed as a secret s among n participants of VSSS. To realize this, the dealer uses two sets \( \cal B \) and \( \cal W \) of binary (Boolean) \(n\times m\) matrices in the following way. To distribute a “black” secret (s=1), he randomly chooses a matrix \( B=(b_{i,j})\in \cal B \) and sends to the ith participant a transparency consisting of m subpixels, where the j th subpixel is black if bi,j = 1 and the jth subpixel is white if \(b_{i,j}=0.\). For distributing s = 0, the dealer does the same but with a randomly chosen matrix 
. An allowed coalition recovers the secret by stacking...
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References
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Blakley, R., Kabatiansky, G. (2005). Visual Secret Sharing Schemes. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_456
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