A Skin Tone Based Stenographic Scheme using Double Density Discrete Wavelet Transforms

Steganography is the art of concealing the existence of data in another transmission medium i.e. image, audio, video files to achieve secret communication. It does not replace cryptography but rather boosts the security using its obscurity features. In the proposed method Biometric feature (Skin tone region) is used to implement Steganography[1]. In our proposed method Instead of embedding secret data anywhere in image, it will be embedded in only skin tone region. This skin region provides excellent secure location for data hiding. So, firstly skin detection is performed using, HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) color space in cover images. Thereafter, a region from skin detected area is selected, which is known as the cropped region. In this cropped region secret message is embedded using DD-DWT (Double Density Discrete Wavelet Transform). DD-DWT overcomes the intertwined shortcomings of DWT (like poor directional selectivity, Shift invariance, oscillations and aliasing)[2].optimal pixel adjustment process (OPA) is used to enhance the image quality of the stego-image. Hence the image obtained after embedding secret message (i.e. Stego image) is far more secure and has an acceptable range of PSNR. The proposed method is much better than the previous works both in terms of PSNR and robustness against various attacks (like Gaussian Noise, salt and pepper Noise, Speckle Noise, rotation, JPEG Compression, Cropping, and Contrast Adjustment etc.)