A Watermarking-based Visual Cryptography Scheme with Meaningful Shares

Visual cryptography schemes with meaningful shares are extension of traditional visual cryptography schemes. Shares are no longer chaotic noises, but have certain sense. They can escape vigilance of the attacker. In this paper, based on digital watermarking, we propose a new visual cryptography scheme with meaningful shares. Compared to the previous schemes proposed in the literatures, the scheme does not change the original pixel expansion, and not only applies for black and white binary images, but also for any gray and color images. Meanwhile, the embedded image in a meaningful share is robust. Before and after being extracted the image´s quality did not change significantly. The scheme is easy to implement and highly feasible.