A Novel Metaheuristic Based Visual Cryptography

Visual cryptography is one of the newest techniques is image encryption. Visual cryptography encrypts visual information and generates two or more shares which contain no information separately, but reveal the secret when superposed. The main advantage of this scheme is that the decoding process does not need any knowledge of cryptography and human visual system is able to decrypt the secret message. In this article, a new encryption method based on particle swarm optimization is provided. The basis matrices are obtained using this approach and then used for encryption. In previous work, a Genetic Algorithm based method was proposed. In our work we fix a subtle yet crucial bug in the GA based method which is generating pictures with negative contrast in some cases and propose a simpler alternative. Simulation results show that the proposed method meets all the initial conditions of visual cryptography while decreasing the number of function evaluations and can provide a contrast enhancement. Moreover, the proposed method has the advantage of being generic and can be used in various threshold based visual cryptography.