CVC: Chaotic visual cryptography to enhance steganography

There is a growing interest to use visual cryptography in security applications. Although visual cryptography methods are interesting, the hackers can easily access the visual components. To increase the security of hidden messages, visual cryptography can be combined with steganography that is the main concern of this paper. In addition, to make the visual cryptography more robust, here, a chaotic function is employed to generate one of the visual components (share). In other words, just one share is sent and the receiver side, the related share is generated and will combine to the received share to reveal the hidden message. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of histogram uniformity, has an acceptable correlation coefficient, key sensitivity and key space. Comparison results demonstrate the supremacy of the proposed method compare to the state of art methods in terms of the mentioned evaluation criteria.