Visual cryptography (VC) is a secret sharing scheme, based on black and white or binary images. Secret images are divided into share images which, on their own, reveal no information of the original secret. Shares may be distributed to various parties so that only by collaborating with an appropriate number of other parties, can the resulting combined shares reveal the secret image. Recovery of the secret can be done by superimposing the share images and, hence, the decoding process requires no special hardware or software and can be simply done by the human eye. Visual cryptography is of particular interest for security applications based on biometrics Visual cryptography is a secret sharing scheme which uses images distributed as shares such that, when the shares are superimposed, a hidden secret image is revealed. In extended visual cryptography, the share images are constructed to contain meaningful cover images, thereby providing opportunities for integrating visual cryptography and biometric security techniques. We have explored extended visual cryptography without expansion. We have shown that using an intelligent pre-processing of halftone images based on the characteristics of the original secret image, we are able to produce good quality images in the shares and the recovered image. Note that other applications can also benefit from the pre-processing approach, such as multiple image visual cryptography, which hides multiple images in shares