A hybrid approach combining data hiding with visual cryptography for secure extraction of data hiding

Visual cryptography (VC) schemes provide a distinguished image encryption technique to protect image security since it can visually decrypt the secret image by superimposing the encrypted shadows. VC schemes for both threshold access structures and general access structures are generally constructed based on the OR operation to minimize the pixel expansion. However, VC schemes with optimal pixel expansion typically have low contrast. Stacking operation OR frequently produces recovered images with poor visual quality and are never able to deliver flawless recovery for secret images. Therefore, we studied XOR-based VC (XVC) schemes that employ linear programming to maximize their contrast. Three schemes for general access structures and three schemes for threshold access structures are designed to maximize their contrast. The proposed schemes’ construction is reduced to a linear programming to maximize the contrast by determining the ideal combinations of basis matrices in terms of primary column matrices and unit matrices, respectively. The comparison study and experimental results demonstrate that the contrast of the previous VC and XVC schemes can be further improved.

Traditional k out of n visual cryptography scheme has been proposed to encrypt single secret image into n shares where only k or more shares can decode the secret image. Many existing schemes on visual cryptography are restricted to consider only binary images as secret which are not appropriate for many important applications. Store-and-Forward telemedicine is one such application where medical images are transmitted from one site to another via electronic medium to analyze the patient's clinical health status. The main objective of Store-and-Forward telemedicine is to provide remote clinical services via two-way communication between the patient and the healthcare provider using electronic medical image, audio and video means. In this paper, a new XOR based Continuous-tone Multi Secret Sharing scheme suitable for store-and-forward telemedicine is proposed to securely transmit the medical images. It also eliminates basic security constraints of VC like pixel expansion in shares/recovered secret images, random pattern of shares, explicit codebook requirement, lossy recovery of secret and limitation on number of secret and shares. Proposed approach is n out of n multi secret sharing scheme which is able to transmit n secret images simultaneously. All secrets could be revealed only after some computations with all n shares and one master share. Master share has been created with the secret key at encoding phase and it can be regenerated at the time of decoding using same secret key. Here all shares are meaningful in continuous-tone which may provide confidentiality to medical images during transmission. Proposed approach not only preserves all basic characteristics of traditional VC but also increases the capacity of secret image sharing. From the experiments we found that irrespective of visible contents of the shares, the probability of getting back the pixel values of respective original secret images at the receiver end is very high.

Since visual cryptography scheme (VCS) was introduced by Naor and Shamir, contrast has been always regarded as an evaluation standard of visual quality of the revealed secret image. However, its original definition only reflects the relative difference between white area and black area of the revealed secret image so that it is incapable to access actual visual quality. Although other definitions of contrast were also proposed, researchers have not reached consensus on the definition of contrast until now. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to obtain recognition result of the revealed character secret image through simulating the recognition procedure of our human eyes. Recognition rate is adopted to evaluate the clearness of the revealed secret image. Experimental results and comparisons demonstrate that recognition rate can be regarded as a new visual evaluation criterion of VCS for character secret image. Finally, a construction of VCS with optimized overall pixel expansion is provided, in which the pixel expansion is thoroughly determined by recognition rate, rather than contrast.

A (k, n)-conventional visual cryptography (VC) scheme is designed to share one secret and each participant takes one share. When some common participants are involved in multiple VC schemes for multiple secrets, each needs to take multiple shares. This procedure needs more shares, which is inconvenient. It is desirable that the collaboration between the VC schemes can allow each common participant to keep only one share. Simply merging or gluing together two traditional (k(1), n(1))- and (k(2), n(2))-VC schemes, after making their pixel expansions the same, might be able to facilitate the collaboration and allow each common participant to keep only one share. But there is a security risk that when a subset of k(1) participants are from the collection of noncommon participants, some from scheme 1 and some from scheme 2, they can reconstruct secret 1, which is inconsistent with the intention of the original scheme. Similarly, k(2) noncommon participants could reconstruct secret 2. This shortcoming is inherited from the brute-force combination of traditional schemes. Therefore, a more sophisticated mechanism is required; this is the main task of this paper. In this paper, we first transform collaborative VC (CVC) schemes into the multiple secrets VC scheme with a general access structure. The construction of the basis matrices in CVC scheme between two VC schemes is formulated into an integer linear programming problem that minimizes the pixel expansion under the corresponding security and contrast constraints. Also the collaboration among more VC schemes is constructed. Finally, the experimental results illustrate the construction procedure of the CVC scheme and demonstrate the effectiveness of the CVC scheme.

Visual Cryptography for General Access Structures

In this paper, we propose a security-enhanced method for the visual cryptography schemes using recursion. Visual cryptography is interesting because decryption can be done with no prior knowledge of cryptography and can be performed without any cryptographic computations. The proposed method, the secret image is encoded into shares and subshares in a recursive way. By using recursion for the visual cryptography schemes, the security and reliability of the secret image can be improved than in the case of existing visual cryptography schemes.

Visual cryptography scheme is a method of encrypting secret image into n noiselike shares. The secret image can be reconstructed by stacking adequate shares. In the past two decades, many schemes have been proposed to realize the cheating prevention visual cryptography scheme (CPVCS). Significantly, Ren et al. [ 9 ] first introduced the idea of CPVCS with the help of Latin square. Inspired by their work, in this article, a new reliable scheme is proposed. More precisely, to facilitate the certification process, we embed meaningful characters into the randomly chosen authentication patterns in each divided blocks. Furthermore, we fix the security vulnerability in the stacked results of share S g and verification Ver g , where 1≤ g ≤ n . Since the improved scheme encrypts the secret image by utilizing random grids, the generated shares have no pixel expansion. Finally, theoretical analysis and experimental results are conducted to evaluate the efficiency and security of the proposed scheme.

In Visual Cryptography Schemes (VCSs), for message n transparencies are generated, such that the original message is visible if any k of them are stacked. VCS especially for large values of k and n, the pixel expansion’s reduction and enhancement of the recovered images’ display quality continue to be critical issues. In addition to this, it is challenging to develop a practical and systematic approach to threshold VCSs. An optimization-based pixel-expansion-free threshold VCSs approach has been proposed for binary secret images’ encryption. Along with contrast, blackness is also treated as a performance metric for assessing the recovered images’ display quality. An ideally secure technique for a secret image’s protection through its partition into shadow images (known as shadows) is the Visual Secret Sharing (VSS) scheme. Acquirement of a smaller shadow size or a higher contrast is the VSS schemes’ latest focus. The white pixels’ frequency has been utilized to demonstrate the recovered image’s contrast in this work. While the Probabilistic VSS (ProbVSS) scheme is non-expansible, it can also be readily deployed depending upon the traditional VSS scheme. Initially, this work has defined the problem as a mathematical optimization model such that, while contingent on blackness and density-balance constraints, there is the maximization of the recovered images’ contrast. Afterward, an algorithm dependent on the Tabu Search (TS) is devised in this work for this problem’s resolution. Multiple complicated combinatorial problems have been successfully resolved with the powerful TS algorithm. Moreover, this work has attempted to bolster the contrast through the density-balance constraint’s slight relaxation. Compared to the older techniques, the proposed optimization-based approach is superior regarding the recovered images’ display quality and the pixel expansion factor from the experimental outcomes.

Visual cryptography (VC) is a method of encrypting a secret image into shares such that stacking a sufficient number of shares reveals the secret image. Shares are usually presented in transparencies. Each participant holds a transparency. Most of the previous research work on VC focuses on improving two parameters: pixel expansion and contrast. In this paper, we studied the cheating problem in VC and extended VC. We considered the attacks of malicious adversaries who may deviate from the scheme in any way. We presented three cheating methods and applied them on attacking existent VC or extended VC schemes. We improved one cheat-preventing scheme. We proposed a generic method that converts a VCS to another VCS that has the property of cheating prevention. The overhead of the conversion is near optimal in both contrast degression and pixel expansion.

The world has become very much dependent on electronic devices and internet with the advancement of new technologies. So, security is also becoming a very vital issue as we share all our details through different electronic mediums to internet. Cryptography is a well known technique of hiding secret data. Visual Cryptography (VC) is a special type of cryptography where we can securely transmit secret data over different transmission mediums. Various visual cryptography schemes have been formulated to carry out the secure transmission of images efficiently. Visual Cryptography provides techniques to share an image efficiently over various internet services. In visual cryptography an image is broken into a number of share images which are later stacked upon to generate the original image. Out of various schemes some have shown very promising results with or without a small increase in the final image dimension which is also referred as pixel expansion. The proper alignment of the distributed shares reveals the original secret image. In this paper we provide a state-of-the-art review and analysis of the several existing schemes of Visual Cryptography.

For visual cryptography scheme (VCS), normally, the size of the recovered secret image will be expanded by m( ≥ 1) times of the original secret image. In most cases, m is not a square number, hence the recovered secret image will be distorted. Sometimes, m is too large that will bring much inconvenience to the participants to carry the share images. In this paper, we propose two visual cryptography schemes which simulated the principle of fountains. The proposed schemes have two advantages: non-distortion and flexible (with respect to the pixel expansion). Furthermore, the proposed schemes can be applied to any VCS that is under the pixel by pixel encryption model, such as VCS for general access structure, color VCS and extended VCS, and our VCS does not restrict to any specific underlying operation. Compared with other non-distortion schemes, the proposed schemes are more general and simpler, real flexible and has competitive visual quality for the recovered secret image.

The visual cryptography scheme (VCS) is an encryption technique that utilizes the human visual system in recovering a secret image and it does not require any complex calculation. However, the contrast of the reconstructed image could be quite low. A number of reversing-based VCSs (or VCSs with reversing) (RVCS) have been proposed for binary secret images, allowing participants to perform a reversing operation on shares (or shadows). This reversing operation can be easily implemented by current copy machines. Some existing traditional VCS schemes without reversing (nRVCS) can be extended to RVCS with the same pixel expansion for binary image, and the RVCS can achieve ideal contrast, significantly higher than that of the corresponding nRVCS. In the application of grayscale VCS, the contrast is much lower than that of the binary cases. Therefore, it is more desirable to improve the contrast in the grayscale image reconstruction. However, when grayscale images are involved, one cannot take advantage of this reversing operation so easily. Many existing grayscale nRVCS cannot be directly extended to RVCS. In this paper, we first give a new grayscale nRVCS with minimum pixel expansion and propose an optimal-contrast grayscale RVCS (GRVCS) by using basis matrices of perfect black nRVCS. Also, we propose an optimal GRVCS even though the basis matrices are not perfectly black. Finally, we design an optimal-contrast GRVCS with a minimum number of shares held by each participant. The proposed schemes can satisfy different user requirements; previous RVCSs for binary images can be viewed as special cases in the schemes proposed here.

Visual Cryptography is a secret sharing scheme which owns the technique of sharing the visual information like pictures, text etc. It encrypts a secret into n visual shares printed in transparencies and shared among n participants. Qualified subsets of participants superimpose their transparencies to reconstruct the actual visual secret. The decryption of the visual secret demands no complex computation as the image can be retrieved by the human visual system after superimposing. This paper proposes a tagged visual cryptography for color images, where the secret image is splitted into two base shares based on the traditional visual cryptography scheme. The generated base shares are stamped with the tag pattern using the probabilistic visual cryptography scheme to obtain the tagged shares. One of the main advantage of using tag patterns is providing the participants with augmented information to identify the relevant shares among the numerous shares. During reconstruction the tag patterns are obtained by folding up the individual tagged shares. Superimposing the shares results in the secret color image which retains its original size thus ensuring no pixel expansion.

Steganography is the art of hiding secret data in a medium whereas visual-cryptography is a cryptographic technique where a full image is encrypted. The security of image steganography depends on the secret key set which is used for embedding the secret image. If the secret key is exposed, the secret image can be retrieved. To solve this security issue we propose a new type of steganography method using visual cryptography. In this method, text and image are used as a secret message and image for the cover object. 24-bit RGB color images are used as both secret and cover images. In this method, we use a new image namely share1 which converts a secret image to a totally different image called share2 image. Typically, knowing the extraction method, people can retrieve the secret message easily. A pseudorandomly generated image is used as a key for visual encryption and this ensures the extra layer of security. By this proposed method, we ensure more secured image steganography.

Most of the secret sharing schemes are based on algebraic calculations in their realizations. But there are some different realizations of the secret sharing schemes. Visual cryptography is one such secret sharing scheme. In a visual cryptographic scheme, for a set P of n participants, a secret image is split into n shadow images called shares, where each participant in P receives one share. Certain qualified subsets of participants can ldquovisuallyrdquo recover the secret image with some loss of contrast, but other forbidden sets of participants have no information about the secret image. In this paper we review with appropriate examples some of the methods for the construction of monochrome visual cryptographic schemes for general as well as for threshold access structures.