Data Steganography for Optical Color Image Cryptosystems

In this paper, an optical color image cryptosystem with a data hiding scheme is proposed. In the proposed optical cryptosystem, a confidential color image is embedded into the host image of the same size. Then the stego-image is encrypted by using the double random phase encoding algorithm. The seeds to generate random phase data are hidden in the encrypted stego-image by a content-dependent and low distortion data embedding technique. The confidential image and secret data delivery is accomplished by hiding the image into the host image and embedding the data into the encrypted stego-image. Experimental results show that the proposed data steganographic cryptosystem provides large data hiding capacity and high reconstructed image quality.