Generalized random grid-based threshold
visual cryptography with meaningful shares
Devdutt Gautam (1904796)
Department of Mechanical Engineering
D.E.I, Agra
e-mail: devduttgautam24@gmail.com
Abstract - The meaningful shares are desired in
visual cryptography (VC) because they look
natural with increased efficiency and low threat
of inkling of secret encryptions. The meaningful
shares are also helpful in dealing with the
management problem of the conventional VC.
The traditional user-friendly RG-based VCs
gives advantage of no pixel expansion and no
need for codebook design in generating
meaningful shares. The current user-friendly
RG-based VCs did not support the general (k, n)
threshold VC and in these complementary
shares may be required. In this paper, a
generalized RG-based VC with meaningful
shares is proposed and it is compared with the
existing meaningful share generation algorithm.
The proposed scheme inherits the good features
of RG-based existing algorithms. The new
feature of the proposed scheme is that it
supports the (k, n) threshold and provide
adaptive visual quality.
I. Introduction
Visual Cryptography is the cryptographic technique
which is used for encrypting the secret image into
shadow images so that no one, other than the
desired recipient can understand the image
information. The shadow images are also called as
shares, we can get the input image after stacking
these shares. There are two types of shares in VC
i.e., meaningful shares and non-meaningful shares.
As the internet is growing very rapidly the digital
images can be easily transmitted, obtained, and
manufactured by the various tools available on the
internet. Security of the images becomes a major
concern as the sensitive information is hidden
inside these images. We can protect the sensitive
information from the malicious behaviour in
transmission by securing these images. The security
of these images can be ensured with cryptography.
Visual Cryptography is defined as the method of
encoding a secret image into ‘n’ shadow images so
that the information hidden inside the images
cannot
Sh. Bhupesh Kumar Satsangi
Department of Mechanical Engineering
D.E.I, Agra
e-mail: bhupesh.mobile@gmail.com
be used by some unauthorized user. The first visual
cryptography technique was introduced by Moni
Naor and Adi Shamir in 1994.Their scheme was
based on encrypting the secret image into ‘n’
shadow images and someone having all the ‘n’
images can decrypt the message. This scheme was
known as ‘k’ out of ‘k’ visual secret sharing.
After further research on visual cryptography, it
was extended to k out of n visual secret sharing [3].
In this type of secret sharing someone having any k
(or more) shares out of n shares can decrypt the
message but is not visible if less than k shares are
stacked together. The original encryption problem
is known as 2 out of 2 visual secret sharing. The
encryption is done with the help of the various
algorithms and the decryption is done with human
visual system in the visual cryptography.
The secret images is composed of black and white
pixels. The black pixels are denoted by ‘1’ which
represents opaqueness and white pixels are denoted
by ‘0’ which represents darkness.
Shamir proposed a (k, n) threshold visual secret
sharing in 1979 [5] by encrypting the secret into a
constant coefficient of a random (k-1) degree
polynomial. According to Shamir’s scheme the
secret image can be reconstructed perfectly by
using LaGrange’s interpolation. Shamir’s
polynomial-based scheme has the advantage that
the secret can be recovered lossless. This scheme
requires only k shares for the reconstruction of
distortion-less secret image.
Naor and Shamir [9] first introduced the visual
cryptography in the year 1984.VC is the secret
sharing scheme that allows the decryption without
any computation. In general (k, n) threshold VC
scheme the secret image is divided into n shares
and we get the decrypted by stacking any k or more
than k shares while any k-1 or less shares did not
give any clue about the secret image [9]. There are
various applications [12] of VC such as information
hiding, watermarking [13], data appending, cyber-
crime, authentication, and identification and
transmitting passwords.
The next we will review the random grid-based VC
and after that we introduce our proposed scheme.
After Naor and Shamir had introduced the VC,
many researchers started finding the problems
associated with VC such as contrast, different
formats, and pixel expansion. Random grid (RG)-
based VC may become the alternative method to
overcome the drawbacks of halftone visual
cryptography (HVC) and extended visual
cryptography (EVC). RG-based VC is used as it
has no pixel expansion and no codebook design is
required in this scheme. AFRI and Keren [1] first
proposed the RG-based VC. According to their
scheme the secret image is encrypted into two
meaningless RGs.The sub pixels are selected
randomly form the two columns under the certain
secret pixel. There is the random selection so that
each column is selected with 50% probabilities. In
that fashion the first subpixel is assigned to RG1
and the followed-up pixel is assigned to RG2 this
process follows up till the last pixel of the secret
image. So, it confirmed that individual share cannot
give any clue about the secret image. When we
stack these shares the black pixels will cover the
white pixels, and the white pixel will decode into
the black or white pixel with 50% probabilities.
This scheme is known as RG-based (2,2) VC. The
size of the shares is same as that of the secret
image. There is some loss of contrast in the
revealed image but we can clearly identify the
image.
Figure 1- RG based (2,2) VC secret pixel encryption
Previous RG-based VC does not support
meaningful shares. Chen and Tsao [17] proposed a
friendly RG-based (2,2) VC to exploit meaningful
shares in VC. Chen and Tsao ‘s scheme use the
complementary shares to achieve adjustable visual
quality. This method is not applicable for (k, n)
threshold where k<n.
The main motivation of this paper is to propose a
threshold RG-based meaningful VC in which there
is no pixel expansion and no codebook design so
that it can be used in other applications apart from
VCs.In this paper we have proposed a meaningful
RG-based VC scheme which supports (k, n)
threshold VC and it also supports adaptive visual
quality. The proposed scheme is compared with one
the threshold meaningful RG –based VC given by
Yan et.al.
Figure 2- RG based (2,2) scheme application
II. Literature Review
In Visual Cryptography given the image or
message, n transparencies are generated so that the
original image (message) is visible if any k of them
are stacked together. The image remains hidden if
fewer than k transparencies are stacked together.
Each pixel appears within n modified versions
(known as shares) per transparency. The shares are
a collection of m black and white subpixels
arranged closely together. The structure can be
described as an n × m Boolean matrix S. The
structure of S can be described thus: S = (sij)m × n
where sij = 1 or 0 i.f.f. the jth subpixel of the ith
share is black or white. The important parameters
of the scheme are: m: the number of pixels in a
share. This represents the loss in resolution from
the original image to the recovered one. α: the
relative difference in the weight between the
combined shares that come from a white and black
pixel in the original image, i.e., the loss in contrast.
γ: the size of the collection of C0 and C1. C0 refers
to the sub-pixel patterns in the shares for a white
pixel and C1 refers to the sub-pixel patterns in the
shares for a black pixel.
1.Visual Cryptography and its Types
a. Traditional Visual Cryptography
Secret sharing [1] is a method by which a secret
can be distributed between a group of participants,
whereby each participant is allocated a piece of the
secret. This piece of the secret is known as a share.
The secret can only be reconstructed when enough
shares are combined. While these shares are
separate, no information about the secret can be
accessed. That is, the shares are completely useless
while they are separated. Within a secret sharing
scheme, the secret is divided into several shares
and distributed among n persons [2][3]. When any
k or more of these persons (where k ≤ n) bring their
shares together, the secret can be recovered.
However, if k - 1 persons attempt to reconstruct the
secret, they will fail. Due to this threshold scheme,
we typically refer to such a secret sharing system as
a (k, n)-threshold scheme or k-out-of-n secret
sharing.
Figure 3- Traditional Visual Cryptography
b. Extended Visual Cryptography
An extended visual cryptography [8] was proposed
by Ateniese et al. to protect a binary secret image
with meaningful shares. This is implemented by
concatenating an extended matrix to each basis
matrix [3][4]. The minimum size of the extended
matrix was obtained from a hypergraph coloring
model and the scheme was designed for binary
images only. Extended visual cryptography
schemes let you construct visual secret sharing
schemes in which the shared images are
meaningful. Image processing means intensive
calculations, reading/writing image files in
different formats, Boolean transformations at the
pixel level, and many other operations. Visual
cryptography [1] represents a technique for
information concealment with major advantages-it
is very low-tech because all that you need to use it
is a couple of transparencies and a printer.
Additionally, the decryption process is immediate
and does not require any cryptographic knowledge
from users. To get the secret information,
participants of the scheme need only properly stack
the transparencies. This presents a high level of
security (some schemes are absolutely secure),
proven in the theoretical studies. That said, visual
cryptography schemes suffer mainly because of
pixel expansion (any pixel in the original image is
expanded during the encryption process to an m×m
matrix of pixels) and loss of contrast. A simple
example of (2,3)-EVCS is presented. In this, they
refer to a corresponding VCS [1] of an EVCS [8],
we mean a traditional VCS that have the same
access structure with the EVCS. Generally, an
EVCS takes a secret image and original share
images as inputs, and outputs shares that satisfy the
following three conditions:
1) Any qualified subset of shares can recover the
secret image;
2) Any forbidden subset of shares cannot obtain
any information of the secret image other than the
size of the secret image;
3) All the shares are meaningful images.
Figure 4- Extended Visual Cryptography
There have been many EVCSs proposed in the
literature. Droste, Ateniese et al., and Wang et al.
proposed three EVCSs, respectively, by
manipulating the share matrices. Nakajima et al.
proposed a (2,2)-EVCS for natural images. Tsai et
al. proposed a simple EVCS, where its shares were
simply generated by replacing the white and black
sub pixels in a traditional VCS share with
transparent pixels and pixels from the cover
images, respectively. Furthermore, Zhou et al.
presented an EVCS by using halftoning techniques,
[6] and hence can treat Gray-scale input share
images. Their methods made use of the
complementary images to cover the visual
information of the share images. Recently, Wang et
al. proposed three EVCSs by using an error treated as an average color. When stacking the
diffusion halftoning technique to obtain nice corresponding blocks of the two shares, there
looking shares. Their first EVCS also made use of would be 242 variations of the resultant color for
complementary shares to cover the visual forming a color image. The approach of Rijmen
information of the shares. Their second EVCS and Preneel indeed can produce visual
imported auxiliary black pixels to cover the visual cryptography for color images. But from the
information of the shares. In such a way, each viewpoint of either the additive model or the
qualified participants did not necessarily require a subtractive model of chromatology, it is not
pair of complementary share images. Their third appropriate to all the blocks with red, green, blue,
EVCS modified the halftoned share images and and white (transparent) colors. Besides, if we use
imported extra black pixels to cover the visual the average of the four-pixel colors in the stacking
information of the shares. However, the limitations blocks to represent the corresponding pixel color in
of these EVCSs mentioned above are obvious. The the original image, the problem of circular
first limitation is that the pixel expansion is large. permutations occurs. Since two circular
For example, the pixel expansion of the EVCS in permutations of a stacking block are not considered
is, where is the pixel expansion of the secret image different, two average colors with different
and is the chromatic number of a hyper-graph; in permutations will be the same in the stacking block
any case, the value of satisfies. The construction of if they have the same combination. Hence the
the pixel expansion, where is the number of number of possible color variation is fewer than the
elements of which contains exactly elements, and is authors claimed 242. Recently, Chang et al.
the set of the qualified subsets. The second proposed a color image sharing technique.
limitation is the bad visual quality of both the
shares and the recovered secret images.
Unfortunately, the EVCS has other limitations: first
it is computation expensive; second, the void and
cluster algorithm make the positions of the secret
pixels dependent on the content of the share images
and hence decrease the visual quality of the
recovered secret image. Third and most
importantly, a pair of complementary images are
required for each qualified subset and the
participants are required to take more than one
shares for some access structures. The same
problems also exist in the first method proposed by
Wang et al. in which each qualified subset does not
require complementary images anymore; however,
this method is only for threshold access structure,
and the auxiliary black pixels of their EVCS also Figure 5- Color Mixture In Subtractive Model
darkened shares.

c. Coloured Visual Cryptography

Rijmen and Preneel had proposed a visual
cryptography approach for color images.[5][9][12]
In their approach, each pixel of the color secret
image is expanded into a 2×2 block to form two
sharing images. Each 2×2 block on the sharing
image is filled with red, green, blue and white
(transparent), respectively, and hence no clue about
the secret image can be identified from any one of
these two shares alone. Rijman and Preneel claimed
that there would be 24 possible combinations
according to the permutation of the four colors.
Because human eyes cannot detect the color of a
very tiny subpixel, the four-pixel colors will be
 Table 1- Absorption of Light
The algorithm Erst create a palette of a secret
image and assigns a unique code to each color on
the palette. It then selects two colored cover
images, O1 and O2, with size the same as the secret
image. Every pixel in the two cover images will be
expanded into a block with M =(k × k) subpixels,
of which M /2 +1 subpixels are randomly selected
and Elled with the color of the expanded pixel and
the rest are Elled with white (transparent) color.
The selection condition is that N positions of the
two expanded blocks are overlapped, where N is
the index of the palette of the secret image and is
used to indicate the pixel color shared by the two
expanded blocks. When recovering the secret
image, the algorithm computes the number of the
overlapping sub pixels of every k × k block in the
two camouflage images and then retrieves the Nth
color from the palette to reconstruct the color of the
corresponding pixel of the secret image. But this
method can only deal with a color image with
limited different colors. For example, if k equals 3,
M /2 +1 is at most 5, which is obviously too small
and unreasonably restrictive for today’s
applications.
Table 2- Possible colors mixed by (C,Y) and M-colored
halftone pixels
We can decompose each color pixel p into three
monochromatic components/pixels, namely pc, pm
and py, in terms of the three primary colors c, m
and y, respectively. In most modern personal
computer systems, Px is represented as a
continuous tone x-colored Gray-level image in
which each pixel px is colored by one of the 256
shades of color x ranging from 0 (white) to 255
(color x), It is easy to transform Px into the
corresponding x-colored halftone image Px by
applying the halftone technology such that each
pixel px in Px is either 0 or color x Hou et al.
proposed a method to improve the above drawback.
They used the binary encoding to represent the sub
pixels selected for each block and applied the
AND/OR operation randomly to compute the
binary code for the stacking sub pixels of every
block in the cover images. The code ranges from 0
to 255, but it can be even larger depending on the
expanding factor. Consequently, a secret image can
be a 256 color or true-color one. Although Chang
and Hou et al. achieved a certain degree of sharing
color image information, the drawback is that
secret images must be decrypted with heavy
computation, which would violate the principle of
visual cryptography that uses human eyes to
decrypt secret images. Hou et al. used the concepts
of color decomposition and contrast adjustment to
produce two shares needed by visual cryptography.
Overlapping these two shares will reveal the secret
information automatically. Although this method
requires no mass computation to reconstruct secret
images, it is nonetheless difficult to obtain totally
random noise shares. Some image boundaries
might be found on each share, thus compromising
the secrecy required. In this method, they combined
the previous results in visual cryptography, the
halftone technology, and the color decomposition
principle to develop algorithms of visual
cryptography for gray-level and color images. The
method retains the advantage of traditional visual
cryptography, namely, decrypting secret images by
human eyes without any cryptography
computation. For information security, it also
ensures that hackers cannot perceive any clue about
the secret image from any individual sharing
image.
Figure 6- Colored Visual Cryptography
d. Halftone Visual Cryptography
This method of secret sharing expands on Naor and
Shamir's original endings in the 2-out-of2 secret
sharing scheme[5]. It also takes extended visual
cryptography a step further. The halftoning
technique that is used can be applied to color and
grayscale images. Halftoning simulates a
continuous tone through the use of dots, varying
either in size or in spacing. Based on the idea of
extended visual cryptography, Zhou et al. [8] set
about improving these techniques by proposing
halftone grayscale images which carry significant
visual information. Traditional VC [1] produces
random patterns of dots with no visual meaning
until the shares are superimposed. This raises the
suspicion of data encryption. Halftoning attempts
to alleviate this suspicion by having visually
pleasing attributes. This means creating halftone
shares that carry one piece of information, such as
another image, while having the secret hidden until
both shares are superimposed. This gives no
indication that any encryption has been performed
on both shares. This drastically improves the
security model for visual cryptography. Along with
Zhou, present novel techniques by which halftone
images can be shared with significant visual
meaning which have a higher quality than those
presented within by employing error diffusion
technique [7]. These error diffusion techniques
spread the pixels as homogeneously as possible to
achieve the improvements in the shares overall
quality. A halftone scheme was proposed in which
the quality of the shares is improved by using
contrast enhancement techniques. However, the
problem with this scheme is that it is not perfectly
secure. By using a space celling curve ordered
dithering technique, grayscale images can be
converted into an approximate binary image. This
allows encryption and decryption of the Gray-level
images using traditional visual cryptography
methods. Further improvements made in this area
were achieved by using better error diffusion
techniques [7], the technique proposed in satisfies
the following 3 requirements: (i) a secret image
should be a natural image, (ii) images that carry a
secret image should be a high-quality natural image
and (iii) computational cost should be low. This
technique is based which satisfies both (ii) and (iii)
and to satisfy (i), introduces an additional feedback
mechanism into the secret image embedding
process to improve the quality of the visually
decoded secret image. Methods described in only
satisfy part of the three requirements. The area of
contrast within halftone and grayscale VC is an
interesting one because the contrast determines
exactly how clear the recovered visual secret is.
Cimato et al. developed a visual cryptography
scheme with ideal contrast by using a technique
known as reversing, which was originally discussed
by. Reversing changes black pixels to white pixels
and viceversa. Viet and Kurosawa's scheme allows
for perfect restoration of the black pixels but only
almost perfect restoration of the white pixels.
Cimato et al. provide their results for perfect
restoration of both black and white pixels. Each
share also contained a smaller amount of
information than Viet and Kurosawa's which makes
it a more desirable and secure scheme. Yang et al.
[12] also looked at reversing and the shortcomings
of Viet and Kurosawa's scheme. Their work
presented a scheme that allowed perfect contrast
reconstruction based on any traditional visual
cryptography sharing scheme.
 RG-based VC does not support meaningful shares.
To exploit meaningful shares in RG-based VC,
Chen and Tsao proposed a friendly RG-based (2, 2)
VC by designing a procedure of distinguishing
different light transmissions on the two shares.
However, in Chen and Tsao's user- friendly RG-
based (2, 2) VC [4], complementary shares are used
to achieve adjustable visual quality. In addition, the
method is not for (k, n) threshold, where k<n. Kafri
and Keren proposed three different algorithms to
accomplish the encryption for the binary images.
Given a secret binary image B, these algorithms as
follows produce two random grids R1 and R2 such
that they leak no information of B individually, yet
they reveal B in our visual system when
superimposed.

Figure 7- Halftone Visual Cryptography

Algorithm
Encryption of a binary image by random grids
Input: A w ×h binary image B where B[i, j] ∈ {0,
1}(white or black), 1_i_w and 1_j _h Output: Two
shares of random grids R1 and R2 which reveal B
e.Random grid based Visual Cryptography when superimposed where Rk[i, j] ∈ {0, 1}
Random grid (RG)-based VC [2][3][4] maybe an (transparent or opaque), 1_i_w,1_j _h and k ∈ {1,
alternative method to overcome the drawbacks, 2}Encryption(B)
since RG-based VC has no pixel expansion and
requires no codebook design. RG-based VC was
first presented by Kafri and Keren, which encrypts
the secret image into two meaningless RGs. To
illustrate the principles of RG-based VC, one of the
three distinct encryption algorithms presented by
Kafri and Keren [2] is shown. Each secret pixel
taken from a secret binary image is encrypted into
one sub pixel in each of the two RGs. The sub
pixels are randomly selected from the two columns
tabulated under the certain secret pixel. The
selection is random so that each column is selected
with the same probabilities (50%). Then, the first
sub pixel is assigned to RG1 and the following sub
pixel is assigned to RG2. Thus, an individual share
gives no clue about the secret image. When the sub
pixels are stacked, the opaque (black) pixels will
cover the transparent (white) pixels. The black
secret pixel will be decoded into black pixel, and
the white secret pixel will be decoded into white
pixel or black pixel with the same probabilities
(50%). As a result, the secret could be revealed by
HVS. The secret is encrypted into two random
shares which have the same size as the secret
image. The revealed image is clearly identified,
Table 3- Probability of occurrence of pixels
although some contrast loss occurs. Follow-up
investigations on RG-based VC [3] were discussed
to extend the features of RG-based VC, such as
contrast, color images, threshold, (n, n) threshold
and (k, n) threshold. Unfortunately, the previous
Depending on the further three algorithms for the
generation of the share images which is a part of
encryption based on probabilistic approach.
Algorithm 1
1. Generate R1 as a random grid, T(R1) = ½
// for (each pixel R1[i, j], 1_i_w and 1_j _h) do
// R1[i, j] = random_pixel (0, 1)
2. for (each pixel B[i, j ], 1_i_w and 1_j _h) do 2.1
{ if (B[i, j] = 0) R2[i, j] = R1[i, j] else R2[i, j] =
R1[i, j] }
3. output (R1,R2)
Algorithm 2
1. Generate R1 as a random grid, T(R1) = 1/2
2. for (each pixel B[i, j ], 1_i_w and 1_j _h) do
2.1 { if (B[i, j] = 0) R2[i, j] = R1[i, j ] else R2[i, j]
= random pixel(0, 1) }
3. output (R1,R2)
Algorithm 3
1. Generate R1 as a random grid, T(R1) = 1/2
2. for (each pixel B [i, j], 1_i_w and 1_j _h) do
2.1 {if (B [i, j] = 0) R2[i, j] = random pixel (0, 1)
else R2[i, j] = R1[i, j] }
3. output (R1,R2)
Note that random pixel (0, 1) is a function that
returns a binary value 0 or 1 to represent a
transparent or opaque pixel, respectively, by a coin-
flip procedure and R1[i, j] denotes the inverse of
R1[i, j]. The three algorithms are capsulated into a
generic procedure named Encryption so that when
Encryption (B) is called, each of Algorithms 1, 2
or3 can be applied onto B. Also note that in this, 0
(1) denotes a white (black) pixel in the secret
binary image or a transparent (opaque) pixel in the
encrypted share interchangeably.
Figure 8- Random grid based Visual Cryptography
f. Progressive Visual Cryptography
Progressive VC [13] takes into consideration the
premise of perfect secret recovery and high-quality
secret reconstruction. Many of the schemes do
require computational effort to perfectly reconstruct
the secret. A technique that enables visual
cryptography to be used on color and grayscale
images is developed in progressive color visual
cryptography. Many current states of the art visual
cryptography techniques lead to the degradation in
the quality of the decoded images, which makes it
unsuitable for digital media (image, video) sharing
and protection. In this, a series of visual
cryptography schemes have been proposed which
not only support grayscale and color images, but
also allow high quality images including that of
perfect (original) quality to be reconstructed. The
meaning of the progressive term refers to how the
final image is built up. For example, when
downloading or viewing an image on a web page,
the image is loaded in stages. The full dimension of
the image is visible but it is very blurry. As more of
the image is downloaded, the clearer the resulting
image becomes, until it is fully loaded. The
annoying presence of the loss of contrast makes
traditional visual cryptography schemes practical
only when quality is not an issue which is relatively
rare. Therefore, the basic scheme is extended to
allow visual cryptography to be directly applied on
grayscale and color images. Image halftoning [5] is
employed to transform the original image from the
grayscale or color space into the monochrome
space which has proved to be quite effective. To
further improve the quality, artifacts introduced in
the process of halftoning have been reduced by
inverse halftoning. With the use of halftoning and a
novel micro block encoding scheme, the technique
has a unique flexibility that enables a single
encryption of a color image but enables three types
of decryptions on the same ciphertext. The three
different types of decryptions enable the recovery
of the image of varying qualities. The physical
transparency stacking type of decryption enables
the recovery of the traditional VC quality image.
An enhanced stacking technique enables the
decryption into a halftone quality image. A
progressive mechanism is established to share color
images at multiple resolutions. Shares are extracted
from each resolution layer to construct a
hierarchical structure; the images of different
resolutions can then be restored by stacking the
different shared images together.
 Figure 10- Moire Pattern
Figure 9- Progressive Visual Cryptography

2. Application of Visual Cryptography

Finding practical and useful applications of this
technology has proved to be somewhat of an issue
over the past fifteen years. In this we attempt to
provide some possible applications for VC in
commercial technologies, specifically within the
secure printing industry.
Figure 11- Magnified Repeating Pattern
a. Morie Patterns
A potential application for visual cryptography is Visual cryptography has been implemented using
its use in conjunction with Moire patterns. Moire Moire patterns. Desmedt and Le provide a scheme
patterns (or fringes) are induced when a revealing by which secrecy and anonymity are both satisfied.
layer such as a dot screen or line grating is Moire patterns occur when high frequency lattices
superimposed on top of a periodically repeating are combined to produce low frequency lattice
shape. The resulting Moire pattern is changing any patterns. It is the difference in these high
of the following geometric parameters frequencies that give the Moire patterns. Figure9
characterizing the individual grid structures, shows an example of these Moire patterns.
namely period, orientation, and shape. Whether a
dot screen or a line grating is used, both induce
Moire fringes with the same geometric properties.
The revealing layer contains horizontal black lines
(line grating), between those lines is transparent
white space. When the revealing layer is
superimposed, the shapes that appear are the
magnified versions of the repeating pattern.
Figure8 demonstrates this magnifying effect. This
magnifying property could be used as a method of
locating hidden VC [2][3] shares within a Moire
pattern. This magnification factor of these patterns Figure 12- Superimposing of Moiré Patterns
can be calculated as follows, let p represent the
period of shapes in the base layer, the period of the
line gratings in the revealing layer is denoted as pr. The Moire cryptography model is as follows: The
For the magnification to work, the periods must be embedded (secret) image is randomized into two
sufficiently close. When the revealing layer is shares, known as pre-shares. These are independent
superimposed, the repeating pattern in the base of the original image. XORing [9] these pre-shares
layer is stretched along the vertical axis. There is will recover the original. Next, the hiding algorithm
no change in the horizontal axis. This takes the cover image and combines it with each of
magnification can be represented as pm. The the pre-shares separately. Its output is the final two
following equation expresses this magnification shares that are used to reveal the original embedded
along the vertical axis: image. These resulting shares look the same as the
input cover image that is used. There are three
different Moire schemes proposed by Desmedt and
Le, lattice rotation, lattice smooth rotation, and dot
orientation. The problem with lattice rotation is that
the boundary between differently-rotated areas in
the shares becomes visible. However, this scheme
produced very sharp decrypted ciphertext. Lattice
smooth rotation fixed the boundary issues but
introduced another problem, namely, the artifacts
introduced into the shares stand out too much and
become visible. The pair settled on the final
scheme, dot orientation, as their chosen
implementation. The dots from the shares are
converted into diamond shape \dots”, this makes
for a less visible boundary than circular or elliptical
dots. The scheme encodes a white pixel by
superimposing two squares onto the shares whose
dots are oriented at different angles. To encode a
black pixel, dot patterns are used that are of the
same angle. This produces two different Moire
patterns for the white and black dots. That means
this scheme uses the Moire patterns to recover the
secret embedded image, rather than traditional
visual cryptography schemes which use the gray
level of the squares to recover the secret.
b. Watermarking
Sonny and Philip invented the “copyright series
management device” to protect the copyright of
digital audio cassettes in 1980’s, it is recognized as
the first device to protect copyright of digital
commercial products. The aim of this product is to
protect the ownership of users and encourage them
to create the products of themselves. In 1996,
Adobe Systems Inc. added watermarking
functionalities in Adobe Photoshop 4.0 which was
developed by Digimarc Inc. At the same time, the
institutes of NEC completed the software: Tiger
Mark Data Blade, Informix Software finished
watermarking functionalities in the database
product InformixUniversal Server (Information
Management System). Europe electronic industries
hope to monitor illegally copy video and audio
commercial products using watermark censoring
system to and the illegal duplications. The project
is called TALISMAN (Tracing Authors’ Rights by
Labelling Image Services and Monitoring Access
Networks), it started from September 1995, 11
communication and broadcasting companies,
research institutes and universities involve in it.
There are two important ID adopted in the system:
ID of the copyright owner which is embedded in
the multimedia data, another is unique international
code such as ISBN. The two IDs are expected to
work jointly so as to protect the ownership. Since
1996, the International Workshop of Information
Hiding was held every year averagely,
watermarking research has become a hot research
area in the past ten years, watermarking has been a
very important issue. In the past ten years, in the
conferences of ACM, IEEE, and IFIP,
watermarking is the main research topics for media
security and assurance. In 1995, Cox et al.
extended watermarking algorithm from spatial
domain, and presented a spread spectrum
watermarking. Even today, this paper has been
widely cited. It is thought of as the important
milestone in watermarking research, it’s the
landmark of robust watermarking. Audio and Video
watermarking are also very important members in
the family. In 2000, Horvatic et al. presents work
about audio watermarking, this approach combined
scrambling and DCT transformation together, it
guarantees the quality of host audio while ensure
the requirements of robustness. The research
scientists from Microsoft research Asian applied
watermarking in video and presented the video
watermarking based on wavelets. In ACM
SIGGRAPH ‘99, Praun et al. presented robust
watermarking for meshes, and introduced
watermarking to computer graphics. Before this
work, Benedens, Ohuchi, Yeung et. al. also studied
this issue; Y. J. Song et al. compare the usual
watermarking techniques. Although watermarking
is designed to protect copyright by embedding
secret to the host media, according to the
differences of functionalities and appearance of
watermarking, watermarking has been grouped into
many categories.
III. Methodology
Algorithm 1:
Encryption of a binary image by random grid.
Input: A w × h binary image S where S [i, j] ∈ {0,
1} (white or black), 1<=i <=w and 1<=j <=h.
Output: Two shares of random grids SC1 and SC2
which reveal S when superimposed. Also, the
shares were of the same size as that of the actual
binary image.
1.Generate a random grid SC1 with the
transparency of 0.5 i.e. (T (R1) = ½). For (each
pixel SC1 [i, j], 1<=i <=w and 1<=j <=h)
2. For each position in the binary image ( B[i, j ],
1<=i <=w and 1<=j <=h) do { if (B[i, j ] = 0)
SC2[i, j ] = SC1[i, j ] else SC2[i, j ] = SC1[i, j ] }
3. Output (SC1, SC2)
Output: Using OR Gate
Figure 13- Shares Generated by Algorithm 1
Figure 14- Recovered Secret Algorithm 1
Algorithm 2:
Threshold random grid based visual secret
sharing system.
Basically, in this algorithm we are trying to do
three things at once and this is an advance and
more complex algorithm.
1.Generation of n different shares for an individual
image and the value of n is selected by the user
itself.
2.Implementing the threshold parameter on the
stacking procedure of the image such that below
the threshold value no image is generated or no
information is produce.
3.Resolving the participant increasing issue in the
VSS.
Algorithm
Input: A w×h binary image S where S[i, j ]∈{0,
1} ;1<=i <=w and 1<=j <=h .
Output: n non-meaningful shares SC1, SC2, SC3,
……. SCn.
Step1: For each position (i, j) where 1<=i<=w and
1<=j <=h. Repeat step 2-5.
Step2: Generate an array of b1, b2, b3……bk.
Where b[i] belongs to {0,1} repeat step 3 for w
belongs to {1,2,3,4…………nk}.
Step3: If share SC[i] not belongs to B[i] then
randomly select p and flip b.
Step4: Select the B[i] where I belong to
{0,1,2,3,4……n} randomly either 1 or 2.
Step5: Now randomly arrange b1, b2, b3…to the
shares.
Step6: Output the n shares SC1, SC2,
SC3…...SCn.
Figure 15- Shares Generated by Algorithm 4
 STEP1: For each position (i, j) € {(i, j) | 1 ≤ i ≤
M,1 ≤ j ≤ N} in the secret image, repeat steps 2-6.

STEP2: Set 𝑏̃1= S (i, j), repeat step 3 for k-2 times,
i.e. for p=1, 2, k-2, to generate pixels b1, b2…….
bk-2, 𝑏̃k-1; where bx and 𝑏̃x denote the temporary
pixels x=1, 2…., n-1, n.

STEP3: If 𝑏̃p=0, 𝑏̃p+1= bp; otherwise 𝑏̃p+1=𝑏̅p.

Figure 16- Recovered secret by Algorithm 4 using OR Where bp is generated randomly by using flipcoin
stacking
function.

STEP4: If the corresponding cover image pixel

C(i,j)=0 ,w=w0 otherwise w=w1.
Output: Using AND Gate
STEP5: Generate a pixel bk-1 by bk-1=g(w).If 𝑏̃k-
1=0 then, bq=bk-1 , q=k,k+1,…….,n ;
otherwise=g(w) ,q=k,k+1,……..,n

STEP6: The order of n pixels b1, b2…..., bn-1, bn

are rearranged and the rearranged n pixels are
assigned to SC1(i, j), SC2(i, j) ………SCn (i, j).

STEP7: Output the n shadow images SC1,

SC2……..., SCn.

Output: Meaningful Shares

Figure 17- Shares generated by algorithm 4

Figure 18- Recovered Secret by Algorithm 4 using AND

stacking

IV. Implementation
Algorithm:
Input: A binary secret image S and a cover image
C both with M*N pixels, the threshold parameters
(k,n) and light transmission parameters
w0 ,w1 ,where 0<w0≤w1<1.

Output: n meaningful shares SC1, SC2…SCn.


Figure 19- Stacking of 3 shares
Figure 20- Stacking of 4 shares
Figure 21- Stacking of 5 shares
V. Conclusion
This paper proposes a Generalized random grid-
based threshold visual cryptography with
meaningful shares. In this technique we have taken
a secret image and converted it into two shares. The
image is taken as input i.e., it may be a colored
image or a gray image. It is then converted into a
binary image. We generate two shares the first is
randomly generated and the second one is
generated by applying some conditions on binary
image and the first share. We obtain the image
when we stack both the shares. The stacking of the
shares is done by using OR gate. A share on an
individual does not convey any information about
the original image. We have used the concept of
progressive visual cryptography means that as we
impose more and more shares on each other we can
get the better visual quality of the recovered secret
image. Random grids are the matrices of the black
and white pixels which can simply decrypt the
secret image by using the stack operation and no
computation is required by the computer. We
computed the contrast of the image by applying the
process on it. To improve the visual quality of the
image we have used modified gates. This paper
possesses the complete knowledge about visual
cryptography, it is types, applications. It comprises
of all the necessary algorithms used for visual
secret sharing using generalized random grids.
Apart from that meaningful share generation
algorithm [16] is also proposed. By using the
meaningful shares, we can increase the efficiency
and security of the images. The shares generated in
meaningful shares are like natural shares. We have
used two images for meaningful shares one is
secret image and the other is cover image. The
secret image is the secret which we want to
transmit and the cover image is used for hiding the
secret image so that any one cannot find out that
secret is transmitted apart from the receiver and the
sender.
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