Visual cryptography schemes with meaningful shares are extension of traditional visual cryptography schemes. Shares are no longer chaotic noises, but have certain sense. They can escape vigilance of the attacker. In this paper, based on digital watermarking, we propose a new visual cryptography scheme with meaningful shares. Compared to the previous schemes proposed in the literatures, the scheme does not change the original pixel expansion, and not only applies for black and white binary images, but also for any gray and color images. Meanwhile, the embedded image in a meaningful share is robust. Before and after being extracted the image's quality did not change significantly. The scheme is easy to implement and highly feasible.
Visual cryptography is a cryptographic technique which emerges in the information security domain in recent years. Each of the sharing sub-keys may be a stochastic noise image or a significative image with no information on the original key. But a mass of sub-keys have to be saved actually, which faces the problem of inconvenient discrimination and management. This paper presents a visual cryptography scheme based on the digital signature for image discrimination and management, applying the digital signature and the time-stamp technology to the visual cryptography scheme. The scheme both solves the problem on the storage and management of the sharing sub-keys, increases the verification of image contents, thus enhances the validity of storage and management without security effect.
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