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An Improved Aspect Ratio Invariant Visual Cryptography Scheme with Flexible Pixel Expansion

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Digital-Forensics and Watermarking (IWDW 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 9569))

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Security Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Wen Wang & Feng Liu

  2. Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Weiqi Yan

  3. Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute, Zhengzhou, China

    Gang Shen

  4. School of Information Science and Technology, University of International Relations, Beijing, China

    Teng Guo

Authors
  1. Wen Wang
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  2. Feng Liu
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  3. Weiqi Yan
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  4. Gang Shen
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  5. Teng Guo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wen Wang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. NJIT, Newark, New Jersey, USA

    Yun-Qing Shi

  2. Korea University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Hyoung Joong Kim

  3. University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain

    Fernando Pérez-González

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Isao Echizen

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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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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31959-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31960-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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