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Contrast-Enhanced Color Visual Cryptography for (k, n) Threshold Schemes

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Published:01 November 2022Publication History
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Abstract

In traditional visual cryptography schemes (VCSs), pixel expansion remains to be an unsolved challenge. To alleviate the impact of pixel expansion, several colored-black-and-white VCSs, called CBW-VCSs, were proposed in recent years. Although these methods could ease the effect of pixel expansion, the reconstructed image obtained by these methods may also suffer from low contrasts. To address this issue, we propose a contrast-enhanced (k, n) CBW-VCS based on random grids, named (k,n) RG-CBW-VCS, in this article. By applying color random grids, a binary secret image is encrypted into n color shares that have no pixel expansion. When any k1 (k1> k) color shares are collected together, the stacked results of them can be identified as the secret image; whereas the superposition of any k2 (k2< k) color shares shows nothing. Through theoretical analysis and experimental results, we justify the effectiveness of the proposed (k, n) RG-CBW-VCS. Compared with related methods in feature, contrast, and pixel expansion, the results indicate that the proposed method generally achieves better performance.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications
        ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications  Volume 18, Issue 3s
        October 2022
        381 pages
        ISSN:1551-6857
        EISSN:1551-6865
        DOI:10.1145/3567476
        • Editor:
        • Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 1 November 2022
        • Online AM: 18 February 2022
        • Accepted: 27 December 2021
        • Revised: 23 October 2021
        • Received: 28 May 2021
        Published in tomm Volume 18, Issue 3s

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