Incrementing visual cryptography using random grids

Visual cryptography (VC) is an image-based secret protection mechanism in which the decoding process is conducted by inspecting the stacked shares with the unaided eye. In traditional VC schemes, the content of an image is usually processed as a single secret, which limits the whole image to unique secret property. Recently, Wang ( IEEE SPL, 16(2009) 659–663) proposed an n-level region incrementing VC scheme which has the ability of incremental revealing of the secrets on an image; however, the pixel expansion of the generated shares increases rapidly in the proposed scheme as n grows. In this paper, we propose an incrementing VC scheme using random grids. The method has the same incremental revealing effect to the secrets on an image, and the size of each share is the same as that of the original image without any expansion. The smaller size of shares makes their further processing such as storage and/or printing out more efficient.