L*a*b* color space high capacity steganography utilizing quad-trees
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L*a*b* color space high capacity steganography utilizing quad-trees Nour Mohamed1
· Mohammed Baziyad1
· Tamer Rabie2
· Ibrahim Kamel2
Received: 24 June 2019 / Revised: 30 April 2020 / Accepted: 27 May 2020 / © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract There has always been a trade-off between embedding capacity and stego quality, and due to this, current research in image steganography suffers either from low embedding capacity in order to preserve high stego image quality, or from sacrificing the stego quality for higher capacity. This paper proposes a steganography scheme that aims to achieve high embedding capacity while preserving stego image quality. The proposed approach utilizes a quad-tree segmentation process to partition the spatial domain of the cover image into high correlation and low correlation adaptive-size blocks. Embedding takes place in the high frequency regions of the discrete cosine transform domain of the highly correlated cover image blocks. Moreover, the L*a*b* color space is utilized for improving the stego image quality. Comparative results demonstrate how the proposed steganography scheme exceeds similar techniques in terms of payload capacity and stego quality using several performance measures. Keywords Steganography · Data hiding · L*a*b* color space · Quad-tree segmentation · Discrete cosine transform · Embedding capacity · Imperceptibility
1 Introduction Steganography, a paradigm for information security and data hiding, is gaining increased interest by the research community in recent years due to the extensive interchange of Nour Mohamed
[email protected] Mohammed Baziyad [email protected] Tamer Rabie [email protected] Ibrahim Kamel [email protected] 1
Research Institute of Sciences & Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE
2
Department of Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE
Multimedia Tools and Applications
multimedia data over the internet and insecure networks [1, 2, 26, 27]. Steganography is the process of concealing secret data in a cover medium resulting in a “stego” medium. The stego medium must be visually similar to the cover medium so that it does not reveal the presence of this hidden data in any way. Capacity, imperceptibility, security and robustness are the conflicting steganography attributes that need to be improved, all or some, in steganography techniques. Capacity is the amount of hidden information in comparison to the size of the cover medium, while imperceptibility represents the level of deterioration in the stego medium as a result of the embedding process. Robustness on the other hand is the ability to maintain the secret data given the presence of attacks on the stego medium. Finally, security is defined as the extent to which an attacker can extract the secret data, or even detect the presence of this hidden data. Images are the most commonly used cover medium in steganography. Image-based hiding techniques are categorized into the spatial domain techniques
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