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A new visual evaluation criterion of visual cryptography scheme for character secret image

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Abstract

Since visual cryptography scheme (VCS) was introduced by Naor and Shamir, contrast has been always regarded as an evaluation standard of visual quality of the revealed secret image. However, its original definition only reflects the relative difference between white area and black area of the revealed secret image so that it is incapable to access actual visual quality. Although other definitions of contrast were also proposed, researchers have not reached consensus on the definition of contrast until now. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to obtain recognition result of the revealed character secret image through simulating the recognition procedure of our human eyes. Recognition rate is adopted to evaluate the clearness of the revealed secret image. Experimental results and comparisons demonstrate that recognition rate can be regarded as a new visual evaluation criterion of VCS for character secret image. Finally, a construction of VCS with optimized overall pixel expansion is provided, in which the pixel expansion is thoroughly determined by recognition rate, rather than contrast.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant No. 61671448 and the Scientific Research Project of Beijing Municipal Educational Committee grant No.KM201611232016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Management, Beijing Information Science & Technology University, Beijing, China

    Y. Ren

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

    F. Liu & W. Wang

  3. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    F. Liu & W. Wang

  4. Department of Computer Science, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    W. Yan

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  1. Y. Ren
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  2. F. Liu
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  3. W. Yan
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  4. W. Wang
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Correspondence to Y. Ren.

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Ren, Y., Liu, F., Yan, W. et al. A new visual evaluation criterion of visual cryptography scheme for character secret image. Multimed Tools Appl 78, 25299–25319 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7698-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-7698-x

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