A Robust Reversible Data Hiding Framework for Video Steganography Applications

Abstract

Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) is a special form of data hiding approach for data integrity and confidentiality protection where the secret image bits (SI) are embedded into Cover Media (CM) by altering its intrinsic pixel attributes. However, in RDH the CM along with the secret message is recovered at the end of computing phase. However, despite of its potential use-cases for enhancing the embedding performance, when it comes to security for various network standards, the traditional RDH mechanisms cannot fully comply with the standards for different set of attacks during the bit-stream transmission scenarios. Therefore, the proposed study contributes towards a computational framework of a robust RDH framework for Video Steganography (VS) which is modeled and simulated under various attack effects and the observation outcome are produced in before and after attack situations to justify the improvement over Embedding Capacity (EC) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) performance for both CM and secret message unlike traditional difference expansion-based methods (DE). The outcome of the study shows that the formulated RDH method not only achieves better reversibility at lower cost of computing but also ensures effective PSNR and imperceptibility outcome for both CM and secret image.