ABSTRACT
Visual cryptography allows effective and efficient secret sharing among a number of trusted parties. This chapter presents an introduction and need for visual cryptography and explores the concept of the formation and validation of a basis matrix. It details evaluation parameters for visual cryptography, identifies different dimensions of visual cryptography, and examines various research gaps present in existing approaches to visual cryptography. Visual cryptography is a cryptographic scheme used to protect and secretly share the images. Visual cryptography can be used for enhancing security for many practical applications in real life. Various proposals have been suggested by researchers for applications of visual cryptography. Visual cryptography can be effectively used for authentication purposes. Using visual cryptography, one can enhance the power and applicability of robust watermarking. Instead of the ownership information (copyright logo) itself, share of ownership information is embedded into the cover image as a robust watermark.
