Visual cryptography by use of polarization
Hirotsugu Yamamoto, Takanori Imagawa, Shiro Suyama · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2010
Visual cryptography is a powerful method to share secret information, such as identification numbers, between plural members. There have been many papers on visual cryptography by use of intensity modulation. Although the use of intensity modulation is suitable for printing, degradation of image quality is a problem. Another problem for conventional visual cryptography is a risk of theft of physical keys. To cope with these problems, we propose a new field of visual cryptography by use of polarization. In this study, we have implemented polarization decoding by stacking films. Use of polarization processing improves image quality of visual cryptography. The purpose of this paper is to construct visual cryptography based on polarization processing. Furthermore, we construct a new type of visual cryptography that uses stacking order as a key for decryption. The use of stacking order multiplies the complexity of encryption. Then, it is effective to prevent secret against theft because the theft cannot determine the secret only by collecting encrypted films.