Flip Extended Visual Cryptography for Gray-Scale and Color Cover Images

Abstract

Visual cryptography (VC) has found numerous applications in privacy protection, online transaction security, and voting security, etc. To counteract potential cheating attacks, Lin et al. proposed flip visual cryptography in 2010, where a second secret image can be revealed by stacking one share with a flipped version of another share. The second secret image can be designed as an additional verification mechanism. However, Lin’s scheme produces meaningless shares and is only applicable to binary secret images. It is interesting to explore whether it is possible to extend the flip VC to having cover images (i.e., extended VC) and these cover images are color images. This problem is challenging since too many restricting conditions need to be met. In this paper, we designed a flip VC for gray-scale and color cover images based on constraint error diffusion. We show that it is possible to meet all the constraints simultaneously. Compared with existing schemes, our scheme enjoys the following features: Color cover images, no computation needed for decoding, and no interference from cover image on the recovered secret image.