Coloured visual cryptography using fixed size meaningful share

Visual cryptography is a useful technique for sharing secret information on a public channel. One of the major strengths of visual cryptography is that the hidden secret, once extracted, can be visualized by the human eye without going through complex computations for decoding. In this paper, a novel visual cryptography scheme is offered that encodes a colour secret image into two meaningful shares. Our proposal provides improvements that allow the size of the meaningful share to stay fixed. This keeps the image from the attention of possible attackers during the transmission. In addition, our new scheme provides three patterns which produce better visual equality for each meaningful share. It also allows a user to produce a different secret image/share with the desired visual effects. Experimental results have demonstrated the practicability and effectiveness of our new scheme.     

A (2, 2) Visual Cryptography Technique with Improved Contrast

ABSTRACT

Visual cryptography is a technique used to share a secret among many participants. The problem with visual cryptography technique is that the secret is not perfectly recovered, i.e. a black secret pixel is perfectly recovered but a white secret pixel is recovered with less contrast. Because of this, the overall quality of recovered secret is poor. So to improve the quality of recovered secret image, we need to improve the contrast. In this paper, we have proposed a (2, 2) visual cryptography technique with improved contrast as compared to the traditional (2, 2) visual cryptography scheme (VCS). In the proposed technique, we have used additional basis matrices for encrypting the secret pixels. The quality of the recovered secret image is compared with traditional (2, 2) VCS using various image quality metrics.     

Visual cryptography for color images

Visual cryptography, an emerging cryptography technology, uses the characteristics of human vision to decrypt encrypted images. It needs neither cryptography knowledge nor complex computation. For security concerns, it also ensures that hackers cannot perceive any clues about a secret image from individual cover images. Since Naor and Shamir proposed the basic model of visual cryptography, researchers have published many related studies. Most of these studies, however, concentrate on binary images; few of them proposed methods for processing gray-level and color images. This paper proposes three methods for visual cryptography of gray-level and color images based on past studies in black-and-white visual cryptography, the halftone technology, and the color decomposition method. Our methods not only retain the advantages of black-and-white visual cryptography, which exploits the human visual system to decrypt secret images without computation, but also have the backward compatibility with the previous results in black-and-white visual cryptography, such as the t out of n threshold scheme, and can be applied to gray-level and color images easily.     

Extended visual cryptography schemes

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.     

A turtle shell-based visual secret sharing scheme with reversibility and authentication

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Visual secret sharing (VSS), also called visual cryptography, allows a secret image to be divided into several shares and the secret image can only be recovered...     

A cheating prevention scheme for binary visual cryptography with homogeneous secret images

In 1995, Naor and Shamir proposed the k-out-of-n visual cryptography scheme such that only more than or equal to k participants can visually recover the secret through superimposing their transparencies. Visual cryptography schemes have been extensively investigated since their invention and extended to numerous applications such as visual authentication and identification, steganography, and image encryption. In 2006, Horng et al. proposed that cheating is possible where some participants can deceive the remaining participants by delivering forged transparencies. Meanwhile, Horng et al. also proposed two cheating prevention schemes. One scheme, however, requires extra verification transparencies and the other needs larger transparencies. In other words, compared to visual cryptography, both schemes burden each participant with an additional problem of transparency management. In this paper, a more secure scheme is given to solve the cheating problem without extra burdens by adopting multiple distinct secret images. Moreover, for sharing these secret images simultaneously, the share construction method of visual cryptography is redesigned and extended by generic algorithms. Finally, the results of the experiment and security analysis show that not only the proposed scheme is more secure in comparison with the two previous cheating prevention schemes in the literature, but extra burdens are also eliminated.     

A random grid-based cyclic access structure VSS scheme for multiple secret images

Visual secret sharing (VSS) schemes based on visual cryptography (VC) or random grids (RGs) have been proposed in the past decade with the advantages of easy implementation, efficiency secret recovering and perfect security. As the concept of multiple secret images has gained more and more attention in academia, the novel concept of VC-based VSS with cyclic access structure has been discussed recently, which is a special case of multiple VSS, allowing participants to reconstruct the secret with the one next or last to him/her in a cyclic order. To obtain the benefit of RG-based VSS compared with VC-based VSS, this paper proposes the new VSS scheme with cyclic access structure for multiple secret images by random grids. The experimental results and theoretical security analysis demonstrate the feasibility.     

Video Identification Based on Watermarking Schemes and Visual Cryptography

Related to the growth of data sharing on the Internet and the wide - spread use of digital media, multimedia security and copyright protection have become of broad interest. Visual cryptography () is a method of sharing a secret image between a group of participants, where certain groups of participants are defined as qualified and may combine their share of the image to obtain the original, and certain other groups are defined as prohibited, and even if they combine knowledge of their parts, they can’t obtain any information on the secret image. The visual cryptography is one of the techniques which used to transmit the secrete image under the cover picture. Human vision systems are connected to visual cryptography. The black and white image was originally used as a hidden image. In order to achieve the owner’s copy right security based on visual cryptography, a watermarking algorithm is presented. We suggest an approach in this paper to hide multiple images in video by meaningful shares using one binary share. With a common share, which we refer to as a smart key, we can decrypt several images simultaneously. Depending on a given share, the smart key decrypts several hidden images. The smart key is printed on transparency and the shares are involved in video and decryption is performed by physically superimposing the transparency on the video. Using binary, grayscale, and color images, we test the proposed method.     

Visual cryptographic techniques for secret image sharing: a review

ABSTRACT

A visual cryptography scheme (VCS) allows one to decrypt images without any knowledge of cryptography and computational efforts. VCS allows secret image sharing such that we can divide the original image into meaningful or nonmeaningful shares. The shares are distributed among participants; during decryption, the original secret image is recovered through stacking all or some of the shares by the human visual system. Various techniques of visual cryptography were constructed mainly for binary images but later, they were enhanced to handle gray-scale or color images. This article focuses on the study of various visual cryptographic schemes and analyses the performance on the basis of various parameters such as, pixel expansion, type of shares generated, image format, number of secret images, encryption method, etc.. In the proposed work, we give a precise and complete review of various visual cryptographic schemes based on different research works related to this area and cite the relevant literature.     

A new visual cryptography with multi-level encoding

Visual secret sharing (VSS) is a visual cryptography scheme which decodes secret messages into several enlarged shares, and distributes them to different participants. The participants can recover the secret messages by stacking their shares, and then secret message can be revealed by human visual sensitivity. Afterward some researchers start to research size invariant scheme, and apply to encode grayscale images such as scenic photos or pictures, not only binary messages. Owing to the gray values distribution of pictures are different, extreme distribution may cause blurred revealed image. In this paper, we proposed a size invariant VSS scheme which is suitable for different distribution of image's gray values. Experiment results show that the reconstructed images of our method, for brighter, darker, and normal images, have clearer and higher contrast, and without apparent artifact and unexpected contour.     

Structure Aware Visual Cryptography

Visual cryptography is an encryption technique that hides a secret image by distributing it between some shared images made up of seemingly random black‐and‐white pixels. Extended visual cryptography (EVC) goes further in that the shared images instead represent meaningful binary pictures. The original approach to EVC suffered from low contrast, so later papers considered how to improve the visual quality of the results by enhancing contrast of the shared images. This work further improves the appearance of the shared images by preserving edge structures within them using a framework of dithering followed by a detail recovery operation. We are also careful to suppress noise in smooth areas.     

Halftone Visual Cryptography Via Error Diffusion

Halftone visual cryptography (HVC) enlarges the area of visual cryptography by the addition of digital halftoning techniques. In particular, in visual secret sharing schemes, a secret image can be encoded into halftone shares taking meaningful visual information. In this paper, HVC construction methods based on error diffusion are proposed. The secret image is concurrently embedded into binary valued shares while these shares are halftoned by error diffusion—the workhorse standard of halftoning algorithms. Error diffusion has low complexity and provides halftone shares with good image quality. A reconstructed secret image, obtained by stacking qualified shares together, does not suffer from cross interference of share images. Factors affecting the share image quality and the contrast of the reconstructed image are discussed. Simulation results show several illustrative examples.      

基本型一般访问结构视觉密码的两种算法

视觉密码是一种完善安全的密码体制。近几年,视觉密码学的研究受到广泛关注。本文提出了一般访问结构的两种算法,通过Ateniese-Blundo-Santis-Stinson模型和累计数组的构造方法,对一般访问结构的基本型视觉密码进行讨论,获得了一个一般访问结构的基本型视觉密码方案。     

On general construction for extended visual cryptography schemes

Numerous visual cryptography schemes (VCSs) have been proposed to protect a secret image with share images. Most VCSs use random-looking shares to code a single binary secret image. Some schemes are designed for color secret images. Droste's [New results on visual cryptography, in: Advances in Cryptology-CRYPTO ’96, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1109, Springer, Berlin, 1996, pp. 401-415] (n,n)-VCS is introduced for multiple binary secret images. Extended VCS (EVCS), by Ateniese et al. [Extended capabilities for visual cryptography, Theoretical Computer Science 250 (2001) 143-161], for binary secret image uses meaningful (innocent-looking) shares. In this paper, we start with a more concise derivation of matrix extension in the ECVS model. This is implemented by concatenating an extended matrix to each basis matrix. We then present a general construction method for single or multiple binary/grayscale/color secret images using matrix extension utilizing meaningful shares. The result (k,n)-visual secret sharing schemes are more general than most existing schemes in terms of the secret/share image types. Using our matrix extension algorithm, any existing VCS with random-looking shares can be easily modified to utilize meaningful shares. The effectiveness of our schemes is demonstrated by real examples.     

基于3维立体技术的视觉加密

视觉加密是新的加密研究领域,其优点是利用人眼视觉系统的特性直接对被加密的内容进行解码,而不需要用专用软件或硬件进行复杂的解密计算。近年来,由于自动立体显示技术和立体眼镜技术的发展,使得3维显示的应用日趋广泛,而传统的视觉加密方法在3维视频领域内尚无法取得令人满意的效果,因此3维立体视觉加密研究具有重要意义。为了更有效地对3维视频进行加密,利用3维显示的原理和特点,将其与视觉加密的优点相结合,提出了一种3维立体视觉加密新方法,该方法利用人眼视觉特性中的视差特性将隐藏信息巧妙地隐藏在右视图中,实验结果表明,该方法是有效的。     

基于视觉密码的身份认证方案

基于视觉密码体制构造了一个高效、可靠的身份认证方案。在方案中仅仅使用了视觉密码和消息认证码两个密码组件,在不降低安全性的前提下,有效地避开了传统密码的缺点。方案中为认证服务器引入了条形码图像作为机密图像,有效地降低了服务器对图像中机密信息自动识别的难度和复杂度,使得方案更加有效、实用。最后对方案的安全性进行分析,说明方案可有效抵抗常见的攻击。     

VMVC: Verifiable multi-tone visual cryptography

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 provides 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 unnecessary encryption constraints like random shares, codebook requirement, contrast loss etc, which all are successfully addressed in proposed approach. Some comparisons with previously proposed methods are also made. Experimental results and analysis are used to prove the efficiency of proposed approach.     

Visual Cryptography for General Access Structures

A visual cryptography scheme for a set ofnparticipants is a method of encoding a secret imageSIintonshadow images called shares, where each participant in receives one share. Certain qualified subsets of participants can “visually” recover the secret image, but other, forbidden, sets of participants have no information (in an information-theoretic sense) onSI. A “visual” recovery for a setX⊆ consists of xeroxing the shares given to the participants inXonto transparencies, and then stacking them. The participants in a qualified setXwill be able to see the secret image without any knowledge of cryptography and without performing any cryptographic computation. In this paper we propose two techniques for constructing visual cryptography schemes for general access structures. We analyze the structure of visual cryptography schemes and we prove bounds on the size of the shares distributed to the participants in the scheme. We provide a novel technique for realizingkout ofnthreshold visual cryptography schemes. Our construction forkout ofnvisual cryptography schemes is better with respect to pixel expansion than the one proposed by M. Naor and A. Shamir (Visual cryptography,in“Advances in Cryptology—Eurocrypt '94” CA. De Santis, Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 950, pp. 1–12, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995) and for the case of 2 out ofnis the best possible. Finally, we consider graph-based access structures, i.e., access structures in which any qualified set of participants contains at least an edge of a given graph whose vertices represent the participants of the scheme.     

一种基于秘密分享的高质量(k,n)可视加密算法

(k,n)可视加密算法是一种重要的信息隐藏算法。应用Shamir秘密分享的概念,将一幅二进制秘密图像隐藏在n幅分享图像中,通过在分享过程中增加随机性控制,保证生成的分享图像是接近噪声图像的无意义图像。从n幅无意义分享图像中,任意选取k幅分享图像,使用拉格朗日插值可提取秘密图像。该算法应用Shamir秘密分享来实现(k,n)可视加密,不需要码书,不会造成无限制的像素扩展。实验结果显示,该算法能实现(k,n)可视加密,提取秘密图像的提取正确率能保证100%。     

具有优化对照度的灰度图像的可视分存方案

在可视分存方案（VCS）中,其解密过程通过人的视觉系统完成。对照度是VCS中重要的研究主题。现有复制设备提供了反色复制的基本功能,黑白图像的全黑反色方案（PBVCS）通过叠加一定数目的分存图像可以精确重构密图,从而为解决VCS重构图像质量问题提供了一种新的途径。给出了灰度图像的反色方案不能直接使用已有的全黑反色PBVCS来构造的原因和存在的问题,进而给出一般灰度图像的反色(k,n)-VCS,该方案的有效性被证明,使用我们的灰度反色VCS,对分存图执行有限次反色和叠加操作可正确重构密图。