Triangular Walking Strategy Based Sand Cat Swarm Optimization for Color Level Determination in Visual Communication

Worldwide, millions of people depend on computer devices, including messaging apps, laptops, and cellphones. Visual Cryptography (VC) is utilized extensively in visual communication systems to secure and encrypting the data in areas such as online transactions, voting, and privacy protection. VC encrypts the secret images and distributes them in to numerous shares, so it ensuring that no single share can reveal the original data. However, current VC methods faces issues like expanding pixel, suboptimal decryption quality, and high computational costs. To address this kind of issues, we introduced novel method leverages (2, 2) secret sharing and integrates the Triangle Walk Strategy based Sand Cat Swarm Optimization (TSCSO) algorithm, specifically introduced for color image encryption in visual communication. TSCSO optimizes the color level selection, it improves the quality of decryption process and reduced the complexity. The scheme maintains the size of shares equal to the original image, avoiding pixel expansion and enhancing both memory utilization and quality of image. The method evaluated with metrics Correlation Coefficient (CC) as 0.0034 and Unified Average Changed Intensity (UACI) as 32.36. Results indicated that this technique enhanced the encryption process compared to other methods like Monarch Butterfly Optimization, Earthworm Optimization and Osprey Optimization Algorithm.