Securing image-based document transmission in logistics and supply chain management through cheating-resistant visual cryptographic protocols.

In today's digital landscape, securing multimedia visual information-specifically color images-is of critical importance across a range of sectors, including the burgeoning fields of logistics and supply chain management. Traditional Visual Cryptography (VC) schemes lay the groundwork for encrypting visual data by fragmenting a secret image into multiple shares, thereby ensuring no single share divulges the secret. Nevertheless, VC faces challenges in ascertaining the integrity of reconstructed images, especially when shares are manipulated maliciously. Existing solutions often necessitate additional shares or a trusted third party for integrity verification, thereby adding complexity and potential security risks. This paper introduces a novel Cheating-Resistant Visual Cryptographic Protocol (CRVC) for Color Images that aims to address these limitations. Utilizing self-computational models, this enhanced protocol simplifies the integrated integrity verification process, eliminating the need for extra shares. A standout feature is its capability to securely transmit meaningful shares for color images without compromising the quality of the reconstructed image as the PSNR maintains to be ∞. Experimental findings substantiate the protocol's resilience against quality degradation and its effectiveness in verifying the authenticity of the reconstructed image. This innovative approach holds promise for a wide array of applications, notably in sectors requiring secure document transmission, such as Logistics and Supply Chain Management, E-Governance, Medical and Military Applications.

Exploration of industrially important pigments from soil fungi.

The worldwide interest of the current era is to increase tendency towards the use of natural substances instead of synthetic ones. So, alternative and effective environment friendly sustainable technologies are highly needed. Due to a broad range of biological activities, fungi are considered as a significant source of pigments. Among the fungal species in the soil, the genera of Aspergillus, Fusarium, Penicillium, Paecilomyces, and Trichoderma are dominant. The pigments commonly produced by fungi belong to aromatic polyketide groups such as melanins, quinones, flavins, ankaflavin, anthraquinone, and naphthoquinone. The use of fungal pigments has benefits which comprise easy and fast growth in the cheap culture medium and different color shades being independent of weather conditions and would be useful in various industrial applications. In relation to the toxic effects of the synthetic dyes, the natural dyes are easily degradable since they cause no detrimental effects. Thus, the study of pigments produced by soil fungi has tremendous use in medical, textile coloring, food coloring, and cosmetics.