PYTHON IMPLEMENTATION OF VISUAL SECRET SHARING SCHEMES

Visual secret sharing schemes (VSS) represent an important concept of visual cryptography. They permit the sharing of a secret image between multiple participants so that only authorized groups can recover the secret. This paper considers the software implementation of some black-and-white secret images VSS in Python programming language. PIL (Python Imaging Library) provides strong image processing capabilities, making the library suitable for this kind of implementation. We present samples of the results obtained from the software computation and draw some conclusions.visual secret sharing, visual cryptography, Python, PIL (Python Imaging Library)

On Real-valued Visual Cryptographic Basis Matrices

Visual cryptography (VC) encodes an image into noise-like shares, which can be stacked to reveal a reduced quality version of the original. The problem with encrypting colour images is that they must undergo heavy pre-processing to reduce them to binary, entailing significant quality loss. This paper proposes VC that works directly on intermediate grayscale values per colour channel and demonstrates real-valued basis matrices for this purpose. The resulting stacked shares produce a clearer reconstruction than in binary VC, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first method posing no restrictions on colour values while maintaining the ability to decrypt with human vision. Grayscale and colour images of differing entropies are encrypted using fuzzy OR and XOR, and their PSNR and structural similarities are compared with binary VC to demonstrate improved quality. It is compared with previous research and its advantages highlighted, notably in high quality reconstructions with minimal processing

Optimal Colored Threshold Visual Cryptography Schemes

Visual cryptography schemes allow the encoding of a secret image into n shares which are distributed to the participants. The shares are such that only qualified subsets of participants can visually recover the secret image. Usually the secret image consist of black and white pixels. In colored threshold visual cryptography schemes the secret image is composed of pixels taken from a given set of c colors. The pixels expansion and the contrast of a scheme are two measures of the goodness of the scheme. In this paper, we study c-color (k,n)-threshold visual cryptography schemes and provide a characterization of contrast-optimal schemes. More specifically we prove that there exists a contrast-optimal scheme that is a member of a special set of schemes, which we call canonical schemes, and that satisfy strong symmetry properties. Then we use canonical schemes to provide a constructive proof of optimality, with respect to the pixel expansion, of c-color (n,n)-threshold visual cryptography schemes. Finally, we provide constructions of c-color (2,n)-threshold schemes whose pixels expansion improves on previously proposed schemes

Efficient Random Grid Visual Cryptographic Schemes having Essential Members

In this paper we consider ``OR based monochrome random grid visual cryptographic schemes (RGVCS) for $t$-$(k,n)^*$ access structure which is a generalization of the threshold $(k,n)$ access structure in the sense that in all the successful attempts to recover the secret image, the $t$ essential participants must always be present. Up to the best of our knowledge, the current proposed work is the first in the literature of RGVCS which provides efficient direct constructions for the $t$-$(k,n)^*$-RGVCS for ``OR based model. Finding the closed form of light contrast is a challenging work. However, in this paper we come up with the closed form of the light contrast for the ``OR based model. In literature, there are visual cryptographic schemes where the secret reconstruction is done by binary ``XOR operation instead of ``OR operation to increase the relative contrast of the decoded image. In this paper, we also propose an extended grid based $t$-$(k,n)^*$-RGVCS in which we replace the traditional ``OR operation by ``XOR operation. Note that the use of XOR operation indicates that the decoding must be performed computationally and not visually. We justified our schemes using both experimental as well as simulation based data

Efficient Construction of Visual Cryptographic Scheme for Compartmented Access Structures

In this paper, we consider a special type of secret sharing scheme known as Visual Cryptographic Scheme (VCS) in which the secret reconstruction is done visually without any mathematical computation unlike other secret sharing schemes. We put forward an efficient direct construction of a visual cryptographic scheme for compartmented access structure which generalizes the access structure for threshold as well as for threshold with certain essential participants. Up to the best of our knowledge, the scheme is the first proposed scheme for compartmented access structure in the literature of visual cryptography. Finding the closed form of relative contrast of a scheme is, in general, a combinatorially hard problem. We come up with a closed form of both pixel expansion as well as relative contrast. Numerical evidence shows that our scheme performs better in terms of both relative contrast as well as pixel expansion than the cumulative array based construction obtained as a particular case of general access structure

A Framework for Multimedia Data Hiding (Security)

With the proliferation of multimedia data such as images, audio, and video, robust digital watermarking and data hiding techniques are needed for copyright protection, copy control, annotation, and authentication. While many techniques have been proposed for digital color and grayscale images, not all of them can be directly applied to binary document images. The difficulty lies in the fact that changing pixel values in a binary document could introduce Irregularities that is very visually noticeable. We have seen but limited number of papers proposing new techniques and ideas for document image watermarking and data hiding. In this paper, we present an overview and summary of recent developments on this important topic, and discuss important issues such as robustness and data hiding capacity of the different techniques

Visual cryptography with cheating shares

Visual cryptography is a technique that applies the human visual system to decode encrypted information, such as text, image and number, without any sophisticated devices and computing capabilities. Therefore, compared with the traditional cryptography, it is apparent that it saves a large amount of time and money on devices and computations. Also, visual cryptography provides the convenience for humans to carry out decryption with a portal card which is significant to the business application. In the past decade, visual cryptography has been thoroughly researched not only on its contrast and subpixel expansion, but also on its applications. The main contribution of this thesis is the security of visual cryptography related to the dishonest shareholders. This is the first known work concerning this variety of potentially secure problem. In the previous papers, the shareholders are inherently honest. However, in the real world, it is impossible to guarantee that every shareholder would be honest forever(e.g., because of the interest of business or military, some shareholders might change to be the traitors). Therefore, a new method based on visual authentication[16] is proposed and the improvement is also made. In this thesis, we also review the previous papers on different fields of the visual cryptography