Joint visual cryptography and watermarking

In this paper, we discuss how to use the watermarking technique for visual cryptography. Both halftone watermarking and visual cryptography involve a hidden secret image. However, their concepts are different. For visual cryptography, a set of shared binary images is used to protect the content of the hidden image. The hidden image can only be revealed when enough shared images are obtained. For watermarking, the hidden image is usually embedded in a single halftone image while preserving the quality of the watermarked halftone image. In this paper, we propose a joint visual-cryptography and watermarking (JVW) algorithm that has the merits of both visual cryptography and watermarking