Applying Visual Cryptography to Data Hiding, Watermarking and Secret Image Sharing for Enhancement of Information Security

Visual cryptography (VC) encrypts visual information (pictures, text, etc.) to shared images. For reconstruction, participants in the qualified set could decrypt visually decode the secret data without the help of computer, while participants in the non-qualified set have no information about the secret. Although VC has beautiful properties of "threshold" and "stacking-to-see" to realize wide applications, the most criticism is its contrast. This restricts its applications. At present time, the practical applications and researches of VC are still not enough. In recent years, many information secure algorithms have been proposed, such as data hiding, watermarking, secret image sharing, and deep learning. VC can be combined with these new technologies to enhance the security of new media. In this Special issue, we want to make VC no longer limited to theoretical research and have more practical application scenarios. The aim of this special issue is to collect papers that combine VC with new security technologies to realize novel and practical applications. Except the reseaches about visual cryptography combining with data hiding, watermarking and secret image sharinging, we solicit original researches papers addressing the topics listed below (but not limited to)