Optimal colored threshold visual cryptography schemes (Q2486869)

Visual cryptography schemes allow a dealer to divide a secret image into \(n\) shares which can then be distributed to the participants. Part of the participants receive special shares, with special properties which allow them to recover the original image from the shares they have. Such shares are considered to be all in the same set, and the sets are called qualified sets. Images have the property to be black and white or have at their disposal a set \(c\) of colors from which they are ``painted''. This paper deals with visual cryptography schemes and selects for study special classes which present interesting properties. Introduction discusses previous work and presents some two basic notions, pixel expansion and contrast of a image, which are then used to compute visual properties of images. Coverage of some other basic notions is provided in section 2 where definitions to \((k,n)\)-treshold schemes, base matrices and efficiency of schemes are provided. The schemes are then studied based on the two properties, contrast and pixel expansion, section 3 deals with optimal contrast \((k,n)\) schemes and provides a linear program whose solution leads to a scheme with optimal contrast property. Section 3 opens the way for providing the proof of the lower bound on pixel expansion. Contrast optimal schemes of section 3, also called cannonical schemes for their strong symmetry properties, are used in section 4 for providing a constructive proof of optimality for \(c\)-color \((n,n)\)-treshold schemes. The final section is dedicated to a research result, a series of constructions for \(c\)-color \((2,n)\)-treshold schemes whose pixel expansion improves on previously proposed schemes.