Enhanced Visual Cryptography: An Augmented Model for Image Security

Security of data has become a necessity in today's world. Data as all know is the raw form and information can be extracted from it. Thus, data needs to be secured. This concern becomes even more significant when share information and it mostly constitute of images. As already know that a picture speaks a thousand words, there is no reason not to believe that picture carry the most information. Furthermore, they can be easily manipulated. This paper presents two schemes to secure such information in the form of images. Under the concept of (k, n) - Visual Cryptography, authors present these two schemes to secretly share images, that can be practically used to secure the information sent. The (3, 3) - enhanced visual cryptographic scheme, enhances security of the currently existing (3, 3) - visual cryptographic scheme by utilizing the concept of keys to secure information. Authors also introduce a new scheme, (2, 3) - visual cryptographic scheme. The (2, 3) - visual cryptographic scheme also utilizes the concepts of keys but reduces the bandwidth requirement or increases reliability. This provides us two modes of operation that are more practical than existing scheme. The paper shall discuss the scheme with a schematic analysis and an analysis of its implementation both subjectively and objectively. Using several parameters of security, this paper presents our findings as our results. The schemes discussed are found to be more secure than existing visual cryptographic scheme and are more reliable and imperceptible. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.