Visual Cryptography for General Access Structure by Multi-pixel Encoding with Variable Block Size

Multi-pixel encoding is an emerging method in visual cryptography for that it can encode more than one pixel for each run. However, in fact its encoding efficiency is still low. This paper presents a novel multi-pixel encoding which can encode variable number of pixels for each run. The length of encoding at one run is equal to the number of the consecutive same pixels met during scanning the secret image. The proposed scheme can work well for general access structure and chromatic images without pixel expansion. The experimental results also show that it can achieve high efficiency for encoding and good quality for overlapped images.