A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF OBJECT ORIENTED STEGANOGRAPHIC TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Steganography is defined as camoufling, secret information within other information i.e. hiding information. The steganography’s main objective is to communicate securely in such a manner that the true information/message is not visible to the intruder. Any unwanted parties should not be able to correlate any sense between cover image and stego image. Thus the stego image must be same as the original cover image. In this paper, a comparative study of steganographic methods that use skin tone detection is done. For comparison three methods are considered. At first steganography using DWT is discussed. It is done in frequency domain as we obtain more precise stego images. Here Haar transform is used which leads to four sub bands. The secret data is embedded into one of the high frequency sub band. In the second method, secret data is embedded within skin region of image that provides an excellent secure location for data hiding. Skin tone detection is performed using HSV and YCbCr color space models. The last implementation is performed by applying skin tone detection using YCbCr color space and the edge of those skin pixels is detected using canny edge detection filter and then the secret image is steganoflaged into cover image. Performances of the three techniques are compared based on the PSNR obtained.