A general multi-secret visual cryptography scheme

In a (k, n) visual cryptography scheme (VCS), a secret image is encoded into n shadow images that are distributed to n participants. Any k participants can reveal the secret image by stacking their shadow images, and less than k participants have no information about the secret image. In this paper we consider the case when the secret image is more than one, and this is a so-called multi-secret VCS (MVCS). The previous works on MVCS are all the simple 2-out-of-2 cases. In this paper, we discuss a general (k, n)-MVCS for any k and n. This paper has three main contributions: (1) our scheme is the first general (k, n)-MVCS, which can be applied on any k and n, (2) we give the formal security and contrast conditions of (k, n)-MVCS and (3) we theoretically prove that the proposed (k, n)-MVCS satisfies the security and contrast conditions.