Multimed Tools Appl DOI 10.1007/s11042-017-4422-6 VMVC: Verifiable multi-tone visual cryptography Shivendra Shivani 1 Received: 23 August 2016 / Revised: 30 December 2016 / Accepted: 20 January 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract Traditional k out of n threshold visual cryptography scheme is proposed to hide a secret image into n shares, where only k or more shares can visually reveal the secret image. Most of the previous state of art approaches on visual cryptography are almost restricted in processing of binary images as secret, which are inadequate for many applications like securely transmission of medical images(Store and Forward Telemedicine), forensic images etc. In this paper, a new Verifiable Multi-toned Visual Cryptography (VMVC) scheme is proposed to securely transmit the confidential images on web. Proposed approach also pro- vides cheating prevention, since each pixel of shares contains a self embedding verifiable bit for integrity test of that pixel. Many existing approaches are suffering from many unnec- essary encryption constraints like random shares, codebook requirement, contrast loss etc, which all are successfully addressed in proposed approach. Some comparisons with previ- ously proposed methods are also made. Experimental results and analysis are used to prove the efficiency of proposed approach. Keywords Verifiable visual cryptography · Multi-toned visual cryptography · Secret sharing · Meaningful shares 1 Introduction Visual Cryptography (VC) is a category of secret sharing scheme, proposed by Naor et al. [17], that allows computation-less decoding of secret images. Mainly in a k-out-of-n visual secret sharing (VSS) scheme, a secret image is encoded into n noise-like shares and printed onto transparencies to distribute them among n participants. Secret image can be decoded by just stacking any k or more transparencies. In spite of using infinite computation power,  Shivendra Shivani shivendra.shivani@thapar.edu 1 Thapar University, Patiala, India