Cheating prevention in Visual Cryptography using steganographic scheme

Visual Cryptography (VC) is a technique to encrypt a secret image into transparent shares such that stacking a sufficient number of shares reveals the secret image without any computation. Cheating is possible in the Visual Cryptographic Schemes (VCS) by dishonest or malicious participant called a cheater, may provide a Fake Share (FS) to cheat the other participants. To achieve cheating prevention in VC we have proposed a steganographic scheme to embed a secret message in each of the shares in random location during share generation phase called stego share. Before stacking receiver can extract hidden message from stego share for checking authentication of shares. In this method no verification share is required to prevent cheating in VC.