A (t, n)-Threshold Visual Secret Sharing Scheme Based on Polarization

With the development of technology, people pay more attention to the development of encryption methods. Visual secret sharing (VSS), also called visual cryptography (VC), involves encrypting a secret image into several images (called shares) that can be stacked together to reveal the secret image. The decryption method in the traditional VSS is equivalent to using logical OR operation. A new VSS idea based on the polarization of light waves was proposed in 1997. Two types of polarizers, vertical and horizontal, are used to generate the light waves. It is customary to regard the vertical polarizer as 1, and the horizontal polarizer as 0, and regard the result of the stacking of two polarizers as a logical XOR operation on two corresponding values. However, this interpretation produces errors when stacking more than two polarizers. Therefore, a new interpretation way is required for VSS based on the polarization of light, called P-VSS. Therefore, we proposed a novel (t, n)-threshold P-VSS scheme based on polarization. The experimental results and theoretical analysis showed that the proposed scheme was more efficient compared with previous studies and outperformed traditional VC schemes.