Non-expansible XOR-based visual cryptography scheme with meaningful shares

XOR-based visual cryptography (VC), a brand-new type of VC, is suitable for solving the low image quality and alignment problems in VC system. However, meaningless share and pixel expansion remain to be continuing challenges in existing XOR-based VC. To fix those mentioned defects, XOR-based VC with meaningful shares is introduced in this paper. A basic algorithm implemented by a simple 2n×n matrix for constructing a (n,n) XOR-based VC is first proposed. In the following stage, a (n,n) XOR-based VC with meaningful shares is investigated by adopting the basic algorithm, where the meaningful share can be directly generated without extra process. Extensive experimental results are demonstrated, exhibiting the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method. Further, sufficient theoretical proofs are provided for illustrating the correctness of the proposed XOR-based VC.