Number Of Secret Images Research Articles

Beyond pixels and ciphers: Navigating the advancements and challenges in visual cryptography

<p>Visual cryptography (VC) has emerged as a pivotal solution for secure information transmission, leveraging its unique capability to encrypt images in a user-friendly and accessible manner. This survey paper provides an in-depth analysis of various VC methods, highlighting their distinct encryption and decryption techniques, applicability, and security levels. The study delves into the technical specifications of each VC type, offering insights into secret image formats, the number of secret images used, types of shares, pixel expansion, and complexity. Significant attention is given to the practical applications of VC, ranging from secure document verification and anti-counterfeiting measures to digital watermarking and online data protection. The paper also identifies key challenges in the field, such as image quality retention post-decryption, computational efficiency, and scalability. Future prospects of VC are explored, particularly its potential integration with emerging technologies like AI and blockchain. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of VC’s current state, its diverse applications, and the future possibilities, making it a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field of data security and cryptography.</p>

Visual Cryptography for Color Images using Digital-Watermarking

Visual cryptography is a cryptographic technique which allows visual information (e.g. picture, texts) to be encrypted in such a way that the decryption can be performed by the human visual system, without the aid of computers. There are various measures on which performance of visual cryptography scheme depends, such as pixel expansion, contrast, security, accuracy, share generated is meaningful or meaningless, type of secret images( either binary or color) and number of secret images(either single or multiple) encrypted by the scheme. In visual cryptography encryption of image is done by dividing the image into n number of shares and decryption process is done by combining a certain number of shares or more. simple visual cryptography is not secure because of the decryption process done by visual system. The information or the image can be retrieved by anyone if the person gets at least some number of shares. Secret image can be reconstructed without any complex computation. In this project we use digital watermarking. Digital watermarking is a technique for inserting secret information into an image, which enables us to know the source or owner of the copyright

Flexible meaningful visual multi-secret sharing scheme by random grids

With rapid developments in network technology, information security is becoming increasingly crucial. To ensure that secret images are not being stolen during transmission, a good countermeasure is to encrypt them before transmission. Visual secret sharing (VSS) is a type of secure communication technology in which a secret image is encrypted into some shares and then restored through human vision by superimposing shares. A random grid is a pivotal VSS technique. Because computation and pixel expansion is not needed in the decrypting phase, many scholars have researched random grids for VSS. To minimize time consumption, some researchers have proposed high-capacity visual multiple secret sharing (VMSS) schemes that can encrypt multiple images simultaneously, although some difficulty is encountered in share management. A meaningful VSS scheme provides a solution for both distinguishing and management problems; however, it cannot handle restrictions on the number of secret images. For avoiding the abovementioned problems, this study proposes an advanced meaningful VMSS scheme that can flexibly adjust the quality between shares and restored images. Our scheme offers seven attractive features that make it notably flexible in theoretical and practical use.

A Note on Multiple Secret Sharing Using Chinese Remainder Theorem and Exclusive-OR

This paper reviews the former existing scheme on (n,n) -multiple secret sharing (MSS) for color images along with its slight limitation. This scheme generates a set of n shared images from a set of n secret images using the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) and Boolean exclusive-OR (XOR) operation. This scheme works well if the number of secret images n is even number. However, the former scheme has a slight problem while the number of secret images n is an odd number. This paper proposes a new technique to overcome this problem by introducing symmetric and transferred masking coefficients to generate a set of shared images. To further improve the security level of the proposed method, a set of secret images is first transformed with hyperchaotic scrambling method before generating shared images. The security of the proposed (n,n)-MSS can also be increased by merging a shared color image into 2-D matrix representation. As documented in the experimental results, the proposed method offers a promising result on (n,n) -MSS scheme regardless of the number of secret images n is odd or even number. In addition, the proposed method outperforms the former existing (n,n)-MSS schemes in terms of quantitative measurements.

A [formula omitted]-multi secret image sharing scheme based on Boolean operations

In (t,n)-multi secret image sharing (MSIS) schemes, a number of secret images are shared among n users so that participation of at least t of them is needed to recover the shared images. Due to the high volume of images and computing complexity of secret sharing schemes, recent Boolean-based approaches are highly desirable. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, existing literature on Boolean-based MSIS schemes only supports two cases: (2,n) and (n,n). In (n,n)-schemes, we lose fault tolerancy such that in the absence of even one share, secret images can not be recovered. On the other hand, (2,n)-MSIS seems to be quite restrictive for the wide range of applications that might occur in practice. It is therefore a challenging problem to propose a Boolean-based (t,n)-MSIS for t≠2,n. The aim of this paper is to solve this problem. We further provide formal proofs of security as well as comparison with existing literature.

Improved multiple secret sharing using generalized chaotic image scrambling

This paper presents a new technique on (n, n)-Multiple Secret Sharing (MSS) of color images. In this task, n shared images are generated from n secret images, while n recovered secret images can be reconstructed from n shared images. The proposed method employs the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and bitwise eXclusive-OR (XOR) operation for generating a set of shared image from a set of secret images. The proposed method improves the security level of (n, n)- MSS scheme by developing and utilizing the generalized chaotic image scrambling. This image scrambling effectively overcomes the problem on former existing MSS scheme while the number of secret images is odd number. As documented in experimental section, the proposed method offers a good result on (n, n)- MSS task. At the same time, the proposed method outperforms the former exising schemes in the MSS field.

Improved Beta Chaotic Image Encryption for Multiple Secret Sharing

This paper proposes a new simple image encryption technique using the Beta chaotic map for performing the confusion and diffusion of input plain image. This image encryption is further applied to the multiple secret sharing (MSS). The former existing scheme in MSS employs the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) and eXclusive-OR (XOR) operations to convert the secret image to become a set of shared images. The former scheme yields a good result while the number of secret images is even. However, it has slight limitation while the number of secret images is odd. This paper aims to overcome this problem by utilizing the proposed image encryption along with three new MSS approaches: 1) incorporating an additional random images; 2) performing k image encryption; and 3) using two different masking coefficients. As documented in the experimental section, the proposed method performs well in the MSS task. It solves the problem in former scheme on dealing with odd number of secret images. In addition, the proposed method is superior compared with the other competing schemes. The proposed image encryption also improves the security level in the MSS system.

Visual multi secret sharing by cylindrical random grid

Visual secret sharing (VSS) is the process of encoding a secret image into several share images in which the original secret image can be reconstructed and recognized by stacking all of the share images together. VSS has two categories: visual cryptography (VC) and Random Grid (RG). The VC is affected by various drawbacks such as: enlarging the size of original image, need for a codebook and the limitation to encode only one secret image at a time. RG solves the first two drawbacks of VC. To solve the third drawback and provide a solution to optimize recent algorithms, we propose a novel RG-based VSS scheme which encodes several secret images at a time. Instead of using only (2, 2) visual secret sharing, (2, n) and (n, n) is employed. This scheme has the ability to encode one or multiple secret images into multiple shares in place of two shares. In our proposed scheme, instead of Circular Random Grid, a new algorithm named Cylindrical Random Grid is used. It encrypts multiple secret images into two or more shares. To decrypt the first secret image, shares are stacked together. For decrypting of other secret images, one of the stacked shares is rotated in a fixed size over other shares based on the number of secret images which are encrypted. This algorithm is simple to implement and less time consuming.