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Visual cryptograms of random grids via linear algebra

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Abstract

Two visual models of image secret sharing have been studied: visual cryptography schemes (VCS), introduced by Naor and Shamir, and visual cryptograms of random grids (VCRG), introduced by Kafri and Keren. VCRG has gained much attention in academia than before to avoid the pixel expansion of VCS. Although there is a strict relation between VCRG and VCS, VCRG can still be improved to achieve a better result. In this paper, based on new insight into linear algebraic technique to construct VCS, where we are able to construct VCS by solving a linear system of more equations at a time, we put forward a new construction of VCRG for general access structures. The effectiveness and advantage of the proposed construction are formally analyzed and experimentally demonstrated. With theoretical and practical interests, our construction exposes new possibilities to the researches of visual models of image secret sharing.

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Acknowledgements

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 No.61602513 and No.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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Correspondence to Gang Shen.

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Shen, G., Liu, F., Fu, Z. et al. Visual cryptograms of random grids via linear algebra. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 12871–12899 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4921-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4921-5

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