A Study on Secret Image Hiding in Diverse Color Spaces

Abstract: Visual Cryptography is a special encryption technique to hide information in images in such a way that human visual system can decrypt the secret without any complex computation. In this study Visual Cryptography shares are created in different Color spaces, to hide the given secret. This article aims at finding the best color space to hide an image which gives qualitatively good result in terms of human visual perception and quantitatively good performances measured using standard metrics like Discrete Entropy, Contrast Improvement Index, and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio.

Keywords: Visual Cryptography, Secret Sharing, Color Space, YCbCr Color Space, HSV Color space, RGB color space, CMY Color space.