Registration-tolerant extended visual cryptography

TLDR: This new approach tolerates registration error for the third image and eases the difficulty, by adopting concentric-circular subpixel arrangement and continuous grayscale subpixel values, and becomes considerably robust to the registration error.

Abstract: Extended Visual Cryptography is a method which encodes a number of images so that when the images are superimposed, the hidden image appears without a trace of original images. The decryption is done directly by human eyes without cryptographic calculations. The proposing system takes three pictures as input and generates two images which correspond to two of the input pictures. The third picture is perceived by superimposing the two output images. Previous methods are based on halftoning and Boolean operations. Transparency values must be quantized before encryption, and a pixel is halftoned by a fixed numbers of completely transparent and opaque subpixels. Then a transparency of the superimposed pixel is controlled by changing the subpixel arrangements of the two output pixels. Since the subpixel arrangement is basically random, a tradeoff exists that to express the more graylevels, each subpixel must become the smaller, making it the more difficult to superimpose by hand. Our new approach tolerates registration error for the third image and eases the difficulty, by adopting concentric-circular subpixel arrangement and continuous grayscale subpixel values. The system becomes considerably robust to the registration error. Also, it achieves quality improvement for all three images, by explicitly dealing with continuous graylevels.