INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND RESEARCH (IJSPR) ISSN: 2349 - 4689

Volume-02, Number- 01, 2014

Contrast Grayscale Image in Visual Cryptography

Using Sigmoid Function
Santosh kumar Prof. Sini Shibu
Dept.of C.S.E Dept.of C.S.E
NRIST-Bhopal, India NRIST-Bhopal, India

Abstract—Visual Cryptography (VC), proposed by Naor and read the secret message from some overlapping shares,
Shamir, has numerous uses, including visual authentication and therefore overcoming the disadvantage of complex
identification, image encryption and steganography for security computation required in the traditional cryptography.
purpose, and. In this paper Contrast the visual information based
on pseudo randomization and pixel reversal using sigmoid The threshold scheme makes the application of visual
function is also proposed. cryptography more flexible. With the t out of n threshold
Keywords— Information hiding, Information Security, Halftone
scheme (t < n); the manager can first produces n copies of
image, Visual cryptography, Secret share. transparency drawn from the secret image and one for each
of his members. If any t of them stacks their transparencies
I. INTRODUCTION together, the content of the secret image will show up. If the
number of transparencies is less than t, the content of the
With the coming era of electronic commerce applications, secret image will remain hidden. In this approach, a page of
there is an essential need to solve the problem of ensuring cipher text and a printed transparency serves as a secret key.
information safety in today’s increasing open network The original text is revealed through placing transparency
environment. The encrypting technologies of traditional with key over the ciphered page though they are
cryptography are usually used to protect information security. indistinguishable from random noise. A secret picture must
By means of such technologies, the data become disordered be shared among n participants. The picture is alienated into
after being encrypted and can then be recovered by a correct n transparencies so that if m transparencies are placed
key, needing a computational overhead in decryption. together the picture is visible. When there are few m
Without the correct key, the encrypted source content can transparencies it is invisible. This ensures that the secret
hardly be detected even though unauthorized persons steal picture is viewed as a set of black and white pixels with each
the data. pixel being handled separately.
Naor and Shamir proposed a new concept of visual II. LITERATURE REVIEW
cryptography (VC) in 1994 [1]. Visual cryptography, an
emerging cryptography technique, uses the characteristics of There have been many published studies of visual
human vision to decrypt the encrypted images. It requires cryptography. Majority of them, have concentrated on
neither cryptography knowledge nor complex computation. discussing black-and-white images, and few of them have
For security purpose, it also ensures that hackers cannot proposed methods for processing gray-level and color
perceive any clues about a secret image from individual images.
cover images. The basic idea is to partition the data into n
pieces known as the shares. Only when a sufficient number Rijmen and Preneel [2] have proposed a visual cryptography
of shares are stacked together will human eyes recognize the approach for color images. In these approach, each pixel of
image content. According to the basic model proposed by the color secret image is expanded into a 2×2 block to form
Naor and Shamir, a (2, 2) visual cryptography scheme that two sharing images. Each 2×2 block on the sharing image is
encodes the secret image into 2 shares, revealing the secret filled with red, green, blue and white (transparent),
image by share stacking. The most notable feature of this respectively, and thus no clue about the secret image can be
approach is that it can recover a secret image without any identified from any one of these two shares alone. Authors
computation. Where it exploits the human visual system to claimed that there would be 24 possible combinations
according to the permutation of the four colors. Because
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND RESEARCH (IJSPR) ISSN: 2349 - 4689
Volume-02, Number- 01, 2014

human eyes cannot detect the color of a very tiny subpixel,

the four-pixel colors will be treated as an average color.
When stacking the corresponding blocks of the two shares, III. EXISTING APPROACHES
there would be 242 variations of the resultant color for
Naor & Shamir [6] implemented a (2, 2) visual cryptography
forming a color image.
where decoded image is double than that of the original
Chang et al. [3] proposed a color image sharing algorithm secret image as pixel p expanded into two sub pixels. This is
which first creates a palette of a secret image and assigns a known as pixel expansion, affecting the contrast of resulting
unique code to each color on the palette. It then selects two image. The (2, 2) visual cryptography scheme has one secret
colored cover images O1 and O2 with size the same as the halftone (gray scale) image (SI) as algorithm input, where SI
secret image. Each and every and pixel in the two cover is said to be a matrix Sij and i and j shows pixel positions and
images will be expanded into a block with M (k×k) where i, j= 1, 2, 3… n.
subpixels, of which [(M/2) + 1] subpixels are randomly
Input: Secret Gray scale image (SI)
selected and filled with the color of the expanded pixel and
the rest are filled with white (transparent) color. The Output: Valid Shares Share1, Share2
selection condition is that N positions of the two expanded
blocks are overlapped, where N is the index of the palette of Method:-
the secret image and is used to indicate the pixel color shared
by the two expanded blocks. When recovering the secret Step1:- Pixels 𝑆𝑖𝑗 with position i and j is the input known as
image, the algorithm computes the number of the overlapping original pixel.
subpixels of every k×k block in the two camouflage images
and then retrieves the Nth color from the palette to Step2:- Apply pixel reversal where, 𝑆𝑖𝑗´ = 255 – 𝑆𝑖𝑗 .
reconstruct the color of the corresponding pixel of the secret
image. But this method can only deal with a color image with Step3:- Use pseudo - random number generator (0.1 to 0.9) to
limited different colors. reduce 𝑆𝑖𝑗´ randomly.

Research Findings: Step4:- Take the difference of 𝑆𝑖𝑗´ with original pixel 𝑆𝑖𝑗 .

The existing approach generates shares pixels, based on Step5:- Employ pseudo-random number generator to reduce
pixel reversal, random reduction in original pixel and reversed value of 𝑆𝑖𝑗´ randomly.
subtractions of the original pixel.
Step6:- Apply pixel reversal i.e 𝑆𝑖𝑗´´ = 255 – 𝑆𝑖𝑗´´
The (2, 2) VC scheme existing in the literature divides the
secret image into two shares so that reconstruction of an Step7:- Save in matrix form as image called share 1.
image from a share is impossible. Each share is printed in
transparencies The original secret image is divided so that it Step8:- Then get the difference of two random number
reveals the secret image after OR operation of qualified generators with original pixel 𝑆𝑖𝑗 .
shares. This approach reveals reduced pixel expansion,
necessary for retrieval of the secret image. Step9:- Apply pixel reversal i.e 𝑆𝑖𝑗´´´ = 255 - 𝑆𝑖𝑗´ .
An efficient c-color (k, n)-threshold visual and secret sharing Step10:- Store 𝑆𝑖𝑗´´´ in matrix as image known as share 2
scheme were developed. VC methods where the same Step11:- Repeat point 1 to 10 for all pixels from original
technique is used to decompose the color secret image into image (i.e. matrix of original image)
three separate images that are respectively colored cyan (C),
magenta (M) and yellow (Y). Then the halftone technique is Here the decoded image and original secret message are of
used to translate the three color images into halftone images. same sizes since there is no pixel expansion effort. But the
Lastly, by combining the three halftone images and a color algorithm is as general as with other decrypted image
halftone image could be generated. Dividing pixels into two schemes which are darker, containing much visual
or more sub pixel helps secret picture retrieval. impairment. The secret decoded image is darker than the

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND RESEARCH (IJSPR) ISSN: 2349 - 4689
Volume-02, Number- 01, 2014

original and increases spatial resolution. The visual cryptography is that it exploits human eyes to decrypt secret
cryptography has the same effect in the decoded image images with no computation required. Our proposed
methodology tries to overcome the drawback of the existing
Objectives: approach by applying sigmoid function in spatial domain for
contrast improvement in the resulting secret image.
The overall objective of this work is mentioned below:
REFERENCE
 To develop an algorithm that provides secret image that
[1] Naor, M. and Shamir, A., Visual cryptography, In Proc.
possesses a much higher readability.
Eurocrypt 94, Perugia, Italy, May 9–12, LNCS 950, Springer
 To propose an approach which provides highly Verlag., 1994, pp. 1–12.
effective contrast enhanced secret images.
[2] V. Rijmen, B. Preneel, Efficient colour visual encryption for
 To propose an approach that improves details in shared colors of Benetton, Eurocrypto’96, Rump Session,
Berlin, 1996.
images without affecting the image or increasing any
amount of noise present to the output image. Improve [3] C.C. Chang, C.S. Tsai, T.S. Chen, A technique for sharing a
the visibility Factor in the resultant image thus make it secret color image, Proceedings of the Ninth National
easy to take a decision and provide better security. Conference on Information Security, Taichung, May 1999, pp.
LXIII–LXXII.
IV. THE PROPOSED METHODOLOGY
[4] Y.C. Hou, F. Lin, C.Y. Chang, Improvement and
The Sigmoid Function is a mathematical function having an implementation of the secret color image sharing technique,
"S" shape (sigmoid curve). The sigmoid function refers to the Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Information
Management, Taipei, November 1999, pp. 592–597.
special case of the logistic function defined by the formula
1 [5] Y.C. Hou, F. Lin, C.Y. Chang, A new approach on 256 color
𝑆 𝑡 =
1 + 𝑒 −𝑡 secret image sharing technique, MIS Review, No.9,
December 1999, pp. 89–105.
The proposed approach defines the application of the sigmoid
function for the contrast improvement in resulting secret [6] Y.C. Hou, C.Y. Chang, F. Lin, Visual cryptography for color
images based on color decomposition, Proceedings of the
image. The proposed approach deals with a mask based on
Fifth Conference on Information Management, Taipei,
the input parameter using a non linear activation function i.e.
November 1999, pp. 584–591.
the sigmoid function. The mask is passed over the entire
image pixel by pixel and resultant image is the processed [7] Hiroki Koga and Hirosuke Yamamoto, Proposal of a lattice-
image after adjusting and contrast enhancement. based visual secret sharing scheme for color and gray-scale
images. IEICE Transaction on Fundamentals, E81-
V. EXPECTED OUTCOMES A(6):1262– 1269.

Our proposed methodology tries to overcome the drawback [8] Haibo Zhang, Xiaofei Wang, Wanhua Cao and Youpeng Huang,
of the existing approach by applying sigmoid function in “Visual Cryptography for General Access Structure Using Pixel-
spatial domain for contrast improvement in the resulting block Aware Encoding”, JOURNAL OF COMPUTERS, VOL.
3, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2008.
secret image which possesses a much higher readability and
proves highly effective in dealing with poor contrast images.
This approach tries to enhance the details in images without
affecting the details or increasing any amount of noise
present to the output image.

VI. CONCLUSION

Visual Cryptography provides one of the secure ways to

transfer images on the Internet. The benefit of visual
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