Design of hierarchical visual cryptography

This paper describes the concept of hierarchical visual cryptography. The key idea behind hierarchical visual cryptography is to encrypt the secret information in number of levels. As the number of levels in hierarchical visual cryptography increases, the secrecy of data tends to increase. An intelligent authentication system is also proposed using hierarchical visual cryptography. The shares generated out of Hierarchical visual cryptography are found to be random giving no information. The expansion ratio is also reduced to 1:2 from 1:4.