Sharing a Secret Image with Encapsulated Shares in Visual Cryptography

Due to advances in digital world, security has become an inseparable issue while transmitting the image. Visual cryptography (VC) is a modern cryptographic technique which is used to the secret image is shared securely and also its information is maintained with utmost confidentiality. A sender transmits the secret image which is divided into shares and it holds hidden information. When all of these shares are aligned and stacked together, they tend to expose the secret image information to the receiver. Earlier VC scheme, the secrecy of the share is not maintained due to any other fake shares can easily insert or modified remain to be continuing challenges. To solve this security issues, a secure share creation scheme constructed by a (2, 2) XOR based VC scheme is proposed. Once the shares are created, it is encrypted separately by using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. In this process, shares and AES algorithm bind together to give the resultant shares are called the encapsulated shares. Consequently, the secret image information cannot be retrieved from any one transparency via human visual perception. The Proposed scheme offers better security for shares and also reduces the fraudulent shares of the secret image. Further, the experimental results and analyses have demonstrated that the proposed scheme can effectively encrypt the image with the fast execution speed and minimized PSNR value. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)