A new technique for progressive visual secret sharing (PVSS) with adaptive priority weight is proposed in this paper. This approach employs the bitwise and eXclusive-OR (XOR) based approaches for generating a set of shared images from a single secret image. It effectively overcomes the former scheme limitation on dealing with an odd number of stacked or collected shared images in the recovery process. The presented technique works well when the number of stacked shared images is odd or even. As documented in experimental results, the proposed method offers good results over binary, grayscale, and color images with a perfectly reconstructed secret image. In addition, the performance of the proposed method is also supported with theoretical analysis showing its lossless ability to recover the secret image. However, it can be considered as a strong substitutive candidate for implementing a PVSS system.
Keywords: adaptive priority weight; eXclusive-OR; lossless; odd number; progressive; secret sharing.