A Novel Stack Based Visual Cryptography Scheme For Cover Images In Secure Communication Applications

Abstract

Communication technologies have undergone a rapid evolution with the advent of state-of-the-art gadgets and transmission schemes. With increasing research in communication models aimed at fast and secure transmissions and receptions, the threat of hackers and malicious users have also grown exponentially. This has given rise to several security models aimed to conceal information being sent across channels in order to prevent unauthorized access and tampering of data in which cryptography is an integral part. Visual cryptography has gained significant importance in recent times due to its inherent merit of not requiring a complicated or dedicated decryption scheme at receiver end which greatly reduces the decryption time as well the computational complexity associated with it. A three-category cover image based stacked visual cryptography model is proposed in this paper and experimentations on visual decryption have been done indicating the merits of visual cryptography.