Size-Adjustable Visual Secret Sharing Schemes(Information Security)

Visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme is a perfect secure method that protects a secret image by breaking it into shadows. Unlike other secret sharing schemes, the VSS scheme can be easily decoded by the human visual sight when staking the shadows. We replace a pixel in the secret image by m sub pixels in the shadow image and the value m is called as pixel expansion. In general, most papers are dedicated to find the minimum m for a VSS scheme, i.e. a smaller shadow size. However, it seems that no one studies how to trade the shadow size for the contrast. In this paper, we take the lead in studying size-adjustable VSS schemes such that one can choose appropriate shadow size and the recovered image contrast for practical use.