Robust video steganography algorithm using adaptive skin-tone detection

Abstract

Human skin regions have recently drawn attention in the literature of data hiding due to its promising robustness characteristics. In this paper, we propose a blind adaptive data hiding algorithm for video files where human skin regions are regarded as the Regions Of Interest (ROI) hosting the embedding process. A skin map is created for each frame using an adaptive skin detection algorithm with reduced number of false positives. Then the skin map is converted to a skin-block-map in order to eliminate the error-prone skin pixels that can result in inefficient retrieval of the hidden data. Moreover, the embedding process is done using a wavelet quantization technique over the red and blue channels of the host frames for increased robustness. Experimental results showed the high imperceptibility of the proposed method as well as its robustness against MPEG-4 compression.