Near-optimal pitch of a moiré grating for image hiding applications in dynamic visual cryptography

Dynamic visual cryptography is based on hiding of a dichotomous secret image in the regular moiré grating. One pitch of the moiré grating is used to represent the secret image and a slightly different pitch of another moiré grating is used to form the background. The secret is decoded in the form of a pattern of a time-averaged moiré fringe when the cover image is oscillated according to a predefined law of motion. The security of the encoding and the sharpness of the decoded secret are mostly influenced by the selection of the pitches of moiré grating. This paper proposes scheme for the determination of near-optimal pitches of the moiré grating for image hiding in dynamic visual cryptography

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

New Designs for Friendly Visual Cryptography Scheme

NSC101-2221-E-032-047[[abstract]]Different from conventional cryptography, visual cryptography is an image cryptographic technique proposed by Naor and Shamir. It encodes a secret image into n pieces of noise-like shares. When k or more than k pieces of shares are gathered from participants, human visual system will disclose the secret image on the stacked image easily. Neither complicated mathematical computation nor any knowledge of cryptography are needed are the main advantages of visual cryptography. In this paper, we propose a new design for friendly visual cryptography scheme. The secret will be hiding into two meaningful shares. The black-appearing ratio in each block of the shares for the corresponding black (rep. white) secret pixel is the same. Therefore, it is impossible for one to disclose any information related to the secret image on each share, which achieves the goal of improving security. When shares are superimposed, the contours of the cover image will disappear on the stacked image, which will only reveal the secret image. According to our experimental results, the contrasts of the shares or the stacked images are good which can reveal the contents of the cover images and the secret image clearly.[[notice]]補正完畢[[journaltype]]國外[[ispeerreviewed]]Y[[booktype]]紙本[[countrycodes]]SG

Secret Sharing in Visual Cryptography

This thesis examines techniques for recursive hiding scheme for 3 out of 5 secret sharing and a probabilistic 2 out of 3 secret sharing scheme for gray scale images. In recursive hiding of secrets several messages can be hidden in one of the shares of the original secret image. The images that are to be hidden are taken according to their sizes from smaller to the largest. The first small secret image is divided into five different shares using visual cryptography. These shares are placed in the next level to create the shares of larger secret information. The shares at each consecutive level are distributed so that no one has access to all the shares of the smaller images, unless at least three participants come together to reveal the secret information, resulting in 3 out of 5 scheme. In the proposed protocol for gray scale images, the quality of the image is perfect when it is reconstructed for the construction of the final image based on the binary OR operation.Computer Science Departmen

Near-optimal pitch of a moiré grating in dynamic visual cryptography

Dynamic visual cryptography (DVC) is a technique for the encryption and decryption of visual secret information. The confidential visual information in DVC is concealed embedding the secret image into the regular moiré grating. The secret can be perceived from the cover image if only the cover image is oscillated according to a predefined law of motion and time-averaging techniques are used. The security of the encryption procedure and the quality of the decrypted image depend on the proper preselection of the pitches of a moiré grating used in the encryption stage. This paper presents the main principles of the determination of near-optimal pair of the pitches of moiré grating as well as graphical schemes and analytical equations in case of harmonic and chaotic oscillations

Privacy-preserving information hiding and its applications

The phenomenal advances in cloud computing technology have raised concerns about data privacy. Aided by the modern cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption, it has become possible to carry out computations in the encrypted domain and process data without compromising information privacy. In this thesis, we study various classes of privacy-preserving information hiding schemes and their real-world applications for cyber security, cloud computing, Internet of things, etc. Data breach is recognised as one of the most dreadful cyber security threats in which private data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by unauthorised parties. Although encryption can obfuscate private information against unauthorised viewing, it may not stop data from illegitimate exportation. Privacy-preserving Information hiding can serve as a potential solution to this issue in such a manner that a permission code is embedded into the encrypted data and can be detected when transmissions occur. Digital watermarking is a technique that has been used for a wide range of intriguing applications such as data authentication and ownership identification. However, some of the algorithms are proprietary intellectual properties and thus the availability to the general public is rather limited. A possible solution is to outsource the task of watermarking to an authorised cloud service provider, that has legitimate right to execute the algorithms as well as high computational capacity. Privacypreserving Information hiding is well suited to this scenario since it is operated in the encrypted domain and hence prevents private data from being collected by the cloud. Internet of things is a promising technology to healthcare industry. A common framework consists of wearable equipments for monitoring the health status of an individual, a local gateway device for aggregating the data, and a cloud server for storing and analysing the data. However, there are risks that an adversary may attempt to eavesdrop the wireless communication, attack the gateway device or even access to the cloud server. Hence, it is desirable to produce and encrypt the data simultaneously and incorporate secret sharing schemes to realise access control. Privacy-preserving secret sharing is a novel research for fulfilling this function. In summary, this thesis presents novel schemes and algorithms, including: • two privacy-preserving reversible information hiding schemes based upon symmetric cryptography using arithmetic of quadratic residues and lexicographic permutations, respectively. • two privacy-preserving reversible information hiding schemes based upon asymmetric cryptography using multiplicative and additive privacy homomorphisms, respectively. • four predictive models for assisting the removal of distortions inflicted by information hiding based respectively upon projection theorem, image gradient, total variation denoising, and Bayesian inference. • three privacy-preserving secret sharing algorithms with different levels of generality