XOR-based meaningful visual secret sharing by generalized random grids

In recent years, random grid (RG) received much attention for constructing visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme without pixel expansion. But recovered secret image with low visual quality reveals due to the stacking operation. To improve the recovered image quality, XOR-based VSS is adopted. However, shares constructed from XOR-based VSS are random-looking. The noise-like appearance further increases the chance of suspicion on secret image communication and imposes difficulty for managing the shares. In this work, a novel (2,2) generalized RG-based VSS is introduced. By adopting the (2,2) VSS, we propose a XOR-based meaningful VSS where shares with meaningful contents are constructed. Moreover, superior visual quality is provided by this method as well.