IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO.

8, AUGUST 2009

659

Region Incrementing Visual Cryptography

Ran-Zan Wang

AbstractThis letter presents a novel visual cryptography

scheme, called region incrementing visual cryptography (RIVC),
for sharing visual secrets with multiple secrecy levels in a single
image. In the proposed -level RIVC scheme, the content of
an image S is designated to multiple regions associated with
secret levels, and encoded to
shares with the following
features: (a) each share cannot obtain any of the secrets in S,
(b) any
shares can be used to reveal
levels of secrets, (c) the number and locations of not-yet-revealed
secrets are unknown to users, (d) all secrets in S can be disclosed
when all of the
shares are available, and (e) the secrets are
recognized by visually inspecting correctly stacked shares without
computation. The basis matrices for constructing the proposed
-level RIVC with small values of
, 3, 4 are introduced, and
the results from two experiments are presented.

(2

+ 1)

+1

+1

=2

Index TermsImage sharing, secret sharing, visual cryptography, visual secret sharing.

I. INTRODUCTION
ISUAL cryptography (VC), invented by Noar and Shamir
[1], is a method for protecting image-based secrets that
VC
has a computation-free decoding process. In the
scheme, the input image is transformed into noise-like shares
to ensure that the contained secret is unreadable. These shares
can be printed on transparent slides and distributed to the
participants. Any subset of or more shares can decrypt the
secret in the original image, but no information about the secret
can be obtained from fewer shares. The decryption process
in a VC scheme involves inspecting the stacked shares with
the unaided eye without computation. The ciphering model of
VC is similar to a one-time pad in the sense that each image
is decrypted with a different set of shares, and provides high
security to the protected secrets.
Following the pioneering research of Noar and Shamir, AteVC scheme to general acniese et al. [2] extended the
cess structures where the dealer can specify all qualified and
forbidden subsets of participants, with participants in a qualified subset being able to reveal the secret in the image and those
in a forbidden subset not being able to do so. In general, there
are two important parameters for a VC scheme: 1) the pixel expansion, which refers to the number of pixels in a share used to

Manuscript received January 15, 2009; revised March 29, 2009. Current version published May 28, 2009. This work was supported by the National Science
Council of Taiwan under Grant NSC96-2221-E-155-073. The associate editor
coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was
Prof. H. Vicky Zhao.
The author is with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Yuan
Ze University, Chung-Li, Taoyuan 320, Taiwan (e-mail: rzwang@saturn.yzu.
edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LSP.2009.2021334

encode a pixel of the secret image and 2) the contrast, which is

the luminance difference between black and white pixels in the
reconstructed image. For a VC scheme, a smaller pixel expansion benefits the printing out and storage of shares, and a high
contrast makes the revealed secret easier to recognize by the unaided eye. The conditions of maximum contrast and minimum
pixel expansion for a VC scheme have been discussed previously [3][6]. Proposed progressive VC schemes using more
flexible decryption effects to produce higher quality images [7],
[8] stack increasing numbers of shares. There have also been
some VC schemes proposed [9][12] for sharing non-bilevel
secrets. Other VC schemes for generating shares with natural
image appearances have been designed with the aim of further
concealing the existence of the secret in the shares [13], [14].
VC schemes reported in the literature usually process the content of an image as a single secret; that is, all of the pixels in the
secret image are shared using a single encoding rule. This type
of sharing policy reveals either the entire image or nothing, and
hence limits the secrets in an image to have the same secrecy
property. A method for recursively hiding secrets in VC was
proposed by hierarchically embedding multiple secrets of different sizes at various levels of an image [15]. There have also
been efforts to share multiple secrets in two images [16][18].
All of these methods are based on superimposing the two shares
at different angles. In this paper, we consider the content of a secret image with multiple regions, where each region has a certain level of secrecy. In this scheme, the secrets in the original
image are hidden in such a way that more levels of secrets are revealed when more shares are obtained in the decoding process.
This property of incremental disclosure of the number of secrets
in an image widens the possible applications of VC schemes.
II. PROPOSED SCHEME
Given the input binary image S containing secret messages,
the proposed scheme allows the dealer to split the content of S
into multiple regions and assign a secrecy property to each region. In our -level region incrementing VC (RIVC) scheme,
the secrecy level of a region has a value ranging from 1 to ,
where the first-level secret is the least significant and the th
level secret is the most significant. More specifically, the dealer
can assign each region of S to a secrecy level according to the
specification of her/his application, which represents the degree
of secrecy of that region. Unlike all previous VC schemes that
adopt a single encoding rule, the basic idea of our RIVC scheme
is applying encoding rules called level kernelsone for each
secrecy levelto encode the secret image. Each level kernel is
used to encode the regions belonging to a certain secrecy property, and hence our RIVC scheme uses the following level kernels: a
VC encoding rule, a
VC encoding
VC encoding rule.
rule,, and an

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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 8, AUGUST 2009

Let matrix
represent the basis matrix
for encoding a white pixel of the th level kernel, and
represent the basis matrix for encoding a black pixel of the th level
kernel. (The requirements of and methods for constructing
and
are discussed in Section III.) The collection of enand
for encoding white and black pixels,
coding matrices
respectively, at the th level are all of the matrices obtained by
and
. The following four
permuting the columns of
steps summarize the procedure for encoding a secret image S to
shares in our -level RIVC scheme.
1) Assign a secrecy level
to each pixel of S
according to the users specification.
2) Fetch a not-yet-processed pixel, , from S according to
the scanning order (e.g., from left to right and from top to
bottom).
3) Examine secrecy level of , and then proceed with one
of the following substeps:
3.1) If is a white pixel, randomly choose an encoding
matrix from the th level encoding matrices
and use
it to encode .
3.2) If is a black pixel, randomly choose an encoding
and
matrix from the th level encoding matrices
use it to encode .
4) Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until all of the pixels in S are proshares for our -level
cessed. This will yield the
RIVC scheme.
The secret decoding process is as simple as that in the tradishares,
tional VC scheme. Given a set of
carefully stacking and aligning them together will reveal the secrets to the unaided eye.
III. CONSTRUCTION OF AN

white pixels, which makes a single share appear with a uniform

contrast so as not to expose the secrets. Stacking any two of the
three shares reveals the first level secret with a contrast of 1/4,
and stacking all three shares reveals the secrets at levels 1 and 2
with contrasts of 1/2 and 1/4, respectively.
The level kernels for constructing the three-level RIVC with
ten-fold pixel expansion are

(2)

(3)

Stacking any two of the four shares reveals the first level secret with a contrast of 1/5; stacking any three shares reveals the
secrets at levels 1 and 2 with contrasts of 3/10 and 1/10, respectively; and stacking all four shares reveals all the secrets at levels
1, 2, and 3 with contrasts of 3/10, 1/10, and 1/10, respectively.
The basis matrices for constructing the four-level RIVC with
23-fold pixel expansion are

-LEVEL RIVC WITH SMALL

The concept of our -level RIVC scheme involves applying

level kernels to encode the secret image. In additional to the
,
VC
basic requirements of the
scheme for these level kernels, the level kernels used to generate our -level RIVC should also meet the following two constraints: 1) the level kernels must have the same degree of pixel
expansion in order to arrange the encoded subpixels of all regions within a share and 2) the areas where no secret is revealed
in the stacked image should appear visually uniform so as not to
reveal the number and regions of not-yet-revealed secrets. Based
on the above requirements, below we provide the basis matrices
, 3, 4.
for the construction of -level RIVC schemes with
The two level kernels for our two-level RIVC with fourfold
pixel expansion are

(4)

(5)

(1)
The same basis matrices are used to encode a white pixel in
the two level kernels, which guarantees that the number and locations of not-yet-revealed secrets remain invisible. Any single
contains two black and two
row in

(6)

WANG: REGION INCREMENTING VISUAL CRYPTOGRAPHY

661

Fig. 1. Results of an experiment with the proposed two-level RIVC scheme: (a) Secret image, (b) secrecy-level decomposition, (c)(e) three encoded shares,
(f)(h) superimposing any two of the three shares, and (i) superimposing all three shares.

Fig. 2. Results of an experiment with the proposed three-level RIVC scheme: (a) Secret image, (b) secrecy-level decomposition, (c)(f) four encoded shares,
(g)(l) superimposing any two of the four shares, (m)(p) superimposing any three of the four shares, and (q) superimposing all four shares.

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IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 8, AUGUST 2009

The minimum contrast between the revealed secret and the

background is 1/23. The above examples indicate that the pixel
expansion increases and the contrast decreases rapidly in the
proposed -level RIVC as increases. This problem results
from the two strict requirements for the generation of the shares
mentioned above, and it limits the applications of our method
in sharing small levels of visual secrets. Future studies should
therefore investigate smaller pixel expansion and higher contrast
in the RIVC scheme.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
This section presents some experimental results to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method. Fig. 1 shows
a computer implementation of our two-level RIVC scheme.
Fig. 1(a) is an image containing five secrets (MSL, RIVC,
2009, CSE, and YZU) that are divided into two parts, as
shown in Fig. 1(b). The level-1 secret contains texts RIVC
and 2009, and the level-2 secret contains texts MSL, CSE,
and YZU. In this experiment, the level kernels presented
in (1) were used to encode the input image. The three shares
generated in this test are shown in Fig. 1(c)(e)they all
appear noise-like with no secret being obvious. Fig. 1(f)(h)
are the results of superimposing any two of the three shares,
revealing the level-1 secrets RIVC and 2009. The result of
superimposing all three shares is illustrated in Fig. 1(i), where
the two secrets at both levels (i.e., RIVC, 2009, MSL,
CSE, and YZU) are revealed.
Fig. 2 shows a computer implementation of our three-level
RIVC scheme. Fig. 2(a) is the secret image, in which the secrets are divided into three parts, as shown in Fig. 2(b). The
level-1 secret contains text RIVC, the level-2 secret contains
texts MSL and 2009, and the level-3 secret contains texts
CSE and YZU. The three level kernels presented in (2) and
(3) were used to encode the input image. The four shares generated are shown in Fig. 2(c)(f). Fig. 2(g)(l) are the results of
superimposing any two of the four shares, revealing the level-1
secret. Fig. 2(m)(p) are the results of superimposing any three
of the four shares, revealing two levels of secrets. The result of
superimposing all four shares is illustrated in Fig. 2(q), revealing
all three levels of secrets.
V. CONCLUSION
VC can be applied to protect image-based secret information with the advantage that the decoding process can be performed by the unaided eye without computation. This letter
has described the -level RIVC scheme that enables the dealer
to specify the content of a secret image to multiple regions,
where each region has its own secrecy property. Like traditional
VC schemes, each generated share has a noise-like appearance
and cannot obtain any secret in the secret image. However, a
new characteristic of the proposed RIVC scheme is that the

number of secrets that can be revealed is proportional to the

number of participants engaged in the decoding process. The
idea of sharing multiple secrets based on regions of an image is
novel in the literature, and it could have various applications for
sharing multiple weighted messages. For example, it could be
used to design a lottery system with three rank prizes in which
the dealer dispatches a set of transparencies using the proposed
three-level RIVC in such a way that a 10% combination of two
stacked transparencies would reveal a symbol representing the
third prize, a 2% combination of three transparencies would reveal two symbols representing the second prize, and a 0.01%
combination of four transparencies would reveal three symbols
representing the first prize. In such a system each transparency
would be considered capable of revealing prizes, which would
entertain the players when they are stacking the transparencies.
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