Video steganography based on DCT psychovisual and object motion

Abstract

Steganography is a technique of concealing the message in multimedia data. Multimedia data, such as videos are often compressed to reduce the storage for limited bandwidth. The video provides additional hidden-space in the object motion of image sequences. This research proposes a video steganography scheme based on object motion and DCT-psychovisual for concealing the message. The proposed hiding technique embeds a secret message along the object motion of the video frames. Motion analysis is used to determine the embedding regions. The proposed scheme selects six DCT coefficients in the middle frequency using DCT-psychovisual effects of hiding messages. A message is embedded by modifying middle DCT coefficients using the proposed algorithm. The middle frequencies have a large hiding capacity and it relatively does not give significant effect to the video reconstruction. The performance of the proposed video steganography is evaluated in terms of video quality and robustness against MPEG compression. The experimental results produce minimum distortion of the video quality. Our scheme produces a robust of hiding messages against MPEG-4 compression with average NC value of 0.94. The proposed video steganography achieves less perceptual distortion to human eyes and it's resistant against reducing video storage.