Sharing more information in gray visual cryptography scheme

Visual cryptography scheme (VCS) shares a binary secret image into several binary shadows, and the secret image can be visually revealed by stacking qualified shadows without computation. From the point of view of sharing secret information, VCS is not efficiency because of the large size expansion and low visual quality. In this paper, we introduce a general gray visual cryptography scheme, which can share more information, called Sharing More Information Gray Visual Cryptography Scheme (SMIGVCS). All the shadow pixels of VCS embed additional information to generate gray shadows of SMIGVCS, and the embedded information comes from the shadows of a polynomial-based secret sharing scheme (PSSS). In the revealing process, a vague secret image is visually decoded by stacking qualified shadows, and more information is revealed by computation. Compared with the two-in-one image secret sharing scheme (TiOISSS), our SMIGVCS can achieve smaller shadow size with acceptable visual quality.