Personalized shares in visual cryptography

Abstract

This article deals with visual cryptography. It consists of hiding a message in two key images (also called shares). The decryption of the message is obtained through human vision by superposition of the shares. In existing methods, the surface of key images is not visually pleasant and is not exploited for communicating textual or pictorial information. Presently, we propose a pictogram-based visual cryptography technique, which generates shares textured with customizable and aesthetic rendering. Moreover, robustness characteristics of this technique to the automated decoding of the secret message are presented. Experimental results show concrete personalized shares and their applicative potentials for security and creative domains.