Rui SHOGENJI^* and Junji OHTSUBO

Department of Systems Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu 432-8561, Japan

(Received April 24, 2009; Accepted June 24, 2009)

Visual cryptography is expected to have various applications since it has potential for visual decoding. However, there are still few practical applications. One reason for this is the difficulty of superposition to decode. To solve the alignment difficulty, we propose an information hiding method which can be physically decode by superimposing a checkered pattern. Superimposing a checkered pattern can also be considered as a kind of image sampling process, and a decoding experiment using an ordinary compact digital camera is presented.

Key words: information hiding, image sampling, image processing, visual cryptography

^*E-mail address: shogenji@sys.eng.shizuoka.ac.jp