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2D Barcodes for visual cryptography

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Abstract

The basic idea of Visual Cryptography (VC) is to divide a secret image into several partitions which are called VC shares. With various categories of VC schemes having been developed to enhance the maturity of VC since its emergence, one of obsessions in current investigations of VC is that each VC share lacks authentication. In this paper, we analyze VC authentication methods using 2D barcodes and embed binary codes into VC shares for authentication purpose. The objective of this paper is to present a method of improving the authentication of traditional VC scheme. Our contribution of this paper is to propose a scheme of embedding 2D barcodes into given VC shares to prevent cheating, we search the best region of a given share where the 2D barcode could be embedded into so as to keep the visual quality of the revealed secret.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, No. 2-14 Wakefield Street, CBD Auckland, 1010, New Zealand

    Guangyu Wang & Wei Qi Yan

  2. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Room 3217, No. B2 Research Building, No. 89A Minzhuang Road, Haidian District, Beijing, China, 100093

    Feng Liu & Wei Qi Yan

Authors
  1. Guangyu Wang
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  2. Feng Liu
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  3. Wei Qi Yan
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Correspondence to Wei Qi Yan.

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Wang, G., Liu, F. & Yan, W.Q. 2D Barcodes for visual cryptography. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 1223–1241 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-2365-8

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