An improved data-hiding approach using skin-tone detection for video steganography

Securing the embedded data and diminishing the distortions in videos remain as challenging goals in data-hiding techniques. In this paper, a steganographic approach is proposed to minimize the probability of detection of the embedded image data in cover video objects. Human skin regions are considered as Regions of Interest (ROI) for embedding the secret data because the hidden data is not noticeable to human visual system (HVS). The proposed technique works with both 2-D and 3-D secret images of any size, which increases the adaptability of the proposed model to the various types of image data. Selective continuous pixel stacks are used to embed the secret data in the cover video object, which is performed over the third Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) component. The approximation coefficient has been entitled to be utilized for the purpose of embedding after the application of third Level DWT over the input video frame to enhance robustness and video quality. The frame matrix further undergoes the skin-map extraction to make the color-based pixel selection. Moreover, the proposed approach is designed with the amalgamation of 8-pixel stack extraction on the third Level DWT over the Red and Blue channels. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme offers high imperceptibility and enhance the robustness against MPEG-4 compression.