Enhanced Technique in VC With Four Meaningful Cover Images

Abstract

Visual cryptography is an important technique for data hiding. In Visual cryptography (VC), a secret image is divided into multiple number of shares. Shares are distributed among multiple recipients, which makes it impossible for hackers to extract secret data from one share without having the other shares and thus data communication becomes secured. The secret data can only be disclosed by human eyes through stacking some or all of the shares. In this paper, we proposed a new image hiding technique that is based on VC. We embed a secret color image in four meaningful cover color images that have the same size as the secret image. The decryption method we used in our technique does not need previous knowledge of cryptography or complex computations thus maintaining the privilege of VC. The secret image can be retrieved if an acceptable number of cover images are stacked, otherwise; the original image retrieved may suffer from distortion and the required quality may not be achieved.According to our experimental results, our technique guarantees better quality of the retrieved secret image without pixel expansion and with less storage used as well as offering higher level of security.