Abstract:

The existing zero- watermarking visual cryptography algorithms breaks down the carrier image and then combines
watermark information to create zero-watermark with copyright identification. This method can enlarge the range of the interference
points in the image to reduce the quality of the extracted watermark. This paper proposes a zero-watermarking visual cryptography
algorithm based on MSB（Most Significant Bit）. This algorithm first breaks down the watermark image by visual cryptography, and then
the decomposed shadow images can be combined into a combination image of the same size of the carrier image. Last, this combination
image is compared with the MSB of the carrier image, and the result is marked with a zero distance matrix. This matrix is the key to
detect the watermark. In this paper, the stability of MSB and the characteristics of visual cryptography have better performance in
attack resistance, and the simulation experiment results show that this algorithm has strong robustness against conventional image
processing and geometric attacks.

Key words: visual cryptography, MSB, zero-watermark