A Novel Visual Cryptographic Method for Color Images

Visual cryptography is considered to be a vital technique for hiding visual data from intruders. Because of its importance, it finds applications in various sectors such as E-voting system, financial documents and copyright protections etc. A number of methods have been proposed in past for encrypting color images such as color decomposition, contrast manipulation, polynomial method, using the difference in color intensity values in a color image etc. The major flaws with most of the earlier proposed methods is the complexity encountered during the implementation of the methods on a wide scale basis, the problem of random pixilation and insertion of noise in encrypted images. This paper presents a simple and highly resistant algorithm for visual cryptography to be performed on color images. The main advantage of the proposed cryptographic algorithm is the robustness and low computational cost with structure simplicity. The proposed algorithm outperformed the conventional methods when tested over sample images proven using key analysis, SSIM and histogram analysis tests. In addition, the proposed method overshadows the standard method in terms of the signal to noise ratio obtained for the encrypted image, which is much better than the SNR value obtained using the standard method. The paper also makes a worst case analysis for the SNR values for both the methods.