Digital Image Security Using Hybrid Visual Cryptography

Internet is become the most used medium for communication of information like text, images, videos etc. The information exchanged on internet is through unsecured network, maintaining security of the information is the most important issue. To secure information from unauthorized users, there is need to convert the information into an unrecognizable format. Visual cryptography is the best known techniques which encrypts an image into n number of shares and decrypt the image with the human visual system without any additional mathematical computations. This paper proposes an improved color image security algorithm. The algorithm encrypt and decrypt the color image using the decomposition of RGB components (sieving), Pixel shuffling, RC4 cipher algorithm, image division and combining using visual cryptography to result in shares of image. The generated encrypted shares are further shared over the network.