Extended visual cryptography schemes

Abstract. Visual cryptography schemes have been introduced in 1994 by Naor and Shamir. Their idea was to encode a secret image into n shadow images and to give exactly one such shadow image to each member of a group P of n persons. Whereas most work in recent years has been done concerning the problem of qualified and forbidden subsets of P or the question of contrast optimizing, in this paper we study extended visual cryptography schemes, i.e. shared secret systems where any subset of P shares its own secret. 1