Analysis of Visual Cryptography, Steganography Schemes and its Hybrid Approach for Security of Images

Abstract — Data security has become a most important issue in data communication especially in the field of Computer Network. The data can have many forms such as text, image, and sound etc. There are many cryptosystems exists to protect data; out of those Visual Cryptography (VC) is a popular technique to protect image based data. It splits the secret image into shares in encryption process and the original image can be retrieved by stacking the required number of shares at the time of decryption. Steganography is another method of cryptosystem used to protect data. It hides the secret inside another data. It makes the secret invisible to users. But in the rapid expansion of cryptanalysis and steganalysis, data is still very insecure in some state of affairs. Hence, to provide a strong security mechanism a hybrid approach using the feature of VC and steganography techniques is wise to adopt. This paper studies the visual cryptography scheme, steganography scheme and various hybrid approaches for data security especially for image based data