Abstract
In traditional visual cryptography scheme (VCS), each pixel of secret image is encrypted into m(\( \geqslant 1 \)) subpixels in the share images. Unfortunately, recovered image will be distorted when the pixel expansion is not a square number. In order to reveal the information of the secret image faithfully, aspect ratio of the recovered image should be kept invariant in VCS. In this paper, we investigate the encryption process of traditional VCS and find that it is able to be divided into mapping stage and size invariant VCS (SIVCS) stage. By improving algorithms of these two stages respectively, we propose a novel construction of aspect ratio invariant VCS (ARIVCS) with flexible pixel expansion. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our scheme that it avoids the defects found in previous research works such as the details distortion problem, thin line problems and blurry edge problem. Meanwhile, our scheme eliminates the jaggy phenomenon to a certain extent when the pixel expansion is large which contributes to improving the visual quality of ARIVCS significantly.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments to improve our work. This work was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences No. Y2W0012102 and the IIE Cryptography Research Project No. Y5X0061102.
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Wang, W., Liu, F., Yan, W., Shen, G., Guo, T. (2016). An Improved Aspect Ratio Invariant Visual Cryptography Scheme with Flexible Pixel Expansion. In: Shi, YQ., Kim, H., Pérez-González, F., Echizen, I. (eds) Digital-Forensics and Watermarking. IWDW 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9569. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31960-5_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31960-5_34
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