Weakly secure visual secret sharing schemes

Abstract

We introduce a visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme with a new security condition, called a weakly secure VSS scheme, which is not unconditionally secure in general, but is designed to be secure for human eyesight. It is shown in this paper that the weakly secure VSS scheme is equivalent to the unconditional one for black-white binary secret images although they are different for color secret images. This fact implies that, at the sacrifice of security, the clearer color images can be reproduced by the weakly secure VSS schemes compared with the unconditional ones. Furthermore, some constructions of weakly secure VSS schemes are presented.