Investigations on secret sharing strategies for image communications using visual cryptography

Abstract

The exposure of Internet has increased the commercial and personal transactions by facilitating communication easier. Sensitive information such as, Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Payment Card Industry (PCI) information and Protected Health Information (PHI) are shared among people as an image file format. The privacy and security of such information is the most imperative constraint while communicating from server to server across the Internet. With the rise in activity of cyber criminals who intercept the sensitive information, it is important to protect it against security breaches, identity theft, and financial frauds. Visual Cryptography (VC) is an efficient encryption scheme used to encrypt a confidential sensitive image into number of shares and transmit the same to the participants. At the destination, the shares are stacked together to reconstruct the confidential image. Individual shares do not expose any data. VC schemes are applied to binary images, grayscale images and color images. In this research work, two new VC schemes namely; (a) Significant Visual Cryptography (SVC), (b) Self-verifiable Computational Visual Cryptography (SCVC) are designed and developed. To support the proposed SVC, a new technique named Error Abatement Technique (EAT) is also developed to generate significant image. The proposed VC schemes support grayscale secret images. The proposed SVC supports SVC, and SVC. This research work intended towards; (a) secure communication of secret image (b) improved quality of the reconstructed secret image (c) no pixel expansion issues (d) minimal computational cost (e) self-verification of the reconstructed secret image to authenticate its integrity. newline