Cheating prevention in Visual Cryptographic Schemes using message embedding: A hardware based practical approach

This paper attempts to give a hardware based practical overview about cheating prevention of information hiding technique using Steganography and Visual Cryptographic Schemes (VCS). A combined technique have been proposed here, which allows visual information (e.g. printed text, handwritten notes, and images) to be distributed into 'n' secret shares as transparencies and embedding message into share became stego share for share authentication. Finally each of these stego shares embeds into a cover image using hardware module. At the time of recovering the receiver first decode each stego shares from the cover work than extract secret message from share to prevent cheating. The original secret message can be retrieve by overlapping the shares. The proposed encoding and decoding scheme for share generation is implemented in software module and embedding of message into share and stego share into cover image are implemented in hardware-based system for 2-D images.