A novel two-in-one image secret sharing scheme based on perfect black visual cryptography

Perfect black visual cryptography scheme (PBVCS) shares a binary secret image into n shadows. Stacking any shadows can reveal a vague secret image, and the black area of the secret image is recovered as perfect black. Two-in-one image secret sharing (TiOISS) scheme is a secret image sharing method with two decoding options. It can not only decode a vague secret image by stacking any k shadows, but also reveal the original grayscale secret image with k shadows by computation. Researchers proposed some TiOISS schemes, which are based on visual cryptography and polynomial-based image secret sharing (PISS). Since PISS reveals the secret image by Lagrange's interpolation, these TiOISS schemes need complex computation. In this paper, we proposed a novel TiOISS scheme based on PBVCS using exclusive OR operation. Compared with literature TiOISS schemes, our scheme does not need complex computation in revealing process, and it can be used in real-time application. The grayscale secret image can be recovered quickly with a few Boolean operations.