Maximizing Contrast in XOR-based Visual Cryptography Schemes

Visual cryptography (VC) schemes provide a distinguished image encryption technique to protect image security since it can visually decrypt the secret image by superimposing the encrypted shadows. VC schemes for both threshold access structures and general access structures are generally constructed based on the OR operation to minimize the pixel expansion. However, VC schemes with optimal pixel expansion typically have low contrast. Stacking operation OR frequently produces recovered images with poor visual quality and are never able to deliver flawless recovery for secret images. Therefore, we studied XOR-based VC (XVC) schemes that employ linear programming to maximize their contrast. Three schemes for general access structures and three schemes for threshold access structures are designed to maximize their contrast. The proposed schemes’ construction is reduced to a linear programming to maximize the contrast by determining the ideal combinations of basis matrices in terms of primary column matrices and unit matrices, respectively. The comparison study and experimental results demonstrate that the contrast of the previous VC and XVC schemes can be further improved.