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Perfect contrast XOR-based visual cryptography schemes via linear algebra

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Abstract

XOR-based visual cryptography scheme (XVCS) was proposed to solve the poor visual quality problem without darkening the background in the reconstructed secret image. However, investigations on XVCS are not sufficient. In this paper, we focus on the traditional model of VCS for general access structures and exploit some extended capabilities for XVCS. Our main contributions are: (1) we put forward constructions of perfect contrast XVCS using the linear algebraic technique without any assumptions such as participants may carry multiple shares or prior information about the shares are to be submitted during the secret reconstruction phase; (2) for some restricted access structures, we achieve perfect contrast and perfect pixel expansion, namely both 1, which is impossible for any OR-based visual cryptography scheme (OVCS); (3) for general access structures, we achieve perfect contrast with smaller pixel expansion compared with many of the results in the literature; (4) Theoretical analysis on the proposed constructions are provided, as well as extensive experimental results and comparisons for demonstrating the effectiveness and advantages of our constructions.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their important and helpful comments. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China with Nos. 61602513 and 61671448, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with No. XDA06010701, and the National Key R&D Program of China with No. 2016YFB0800100.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, 450000, China

    Gang Shen, Zhengxin Fu & Bin Yu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Feng Liu

  3. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Feng Liu

Authors
  1. Gang Shen
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  2. Feng Liu
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  3. Zhengxin Fu
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  4. Bin Yu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gang Shen.

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Communicated by C. Mitchell.

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Shen, G., Liu, F., Fu, Z. et al. Perfect contrast XOR-based visual cryptography schemes via linear algebra. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 85, 15–37 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-016-0285-5

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