ADVANCED COLOR COVERT IMAGE SHARING USING ARNOLD CAT MAP AND VISUAL CRYPTOGRAPHY

The demand for effective information security schemes is increasing day by day with the continual growth of the internet. Visual cryptography (VC) is a very important secret sharing scheme. The essential step behind this secret sharing scheme is to convert the color covert image into multiple indecipherable image shares so it cannot reveal the data within the color covert image unless combined along by some mathematical calculation. This paper proposes an advanced color covert image-sharing scheme using Arnold cat map (ACM) and VC. The random matrix-encoding scheme encodes the color covert image into an image matrix. ACM algorithm disrupts the high correlation among the pixels of the image matrix to generate an encrypted image. The generation of shares from this encrypted image is by VC that uses pixel reversal and random matrix generator. The shares one by one does not provide any information concerning the color covert image however put together they offer back the encrypted image. The projected paradigm offers 3 levels of security and through decipherment gives back the covert image without loss of information. Related examples and experimental results reveal the effectiveness of this scheme.