An Optimized Video Steganography Technique using Hybrid Approach

Abstract

Steganography is a technique that includes concealing secret information in a suitable newlinecarrier file such as text, image, audio, and video in such a manner that secret information remains newlineinvisible to the outside world. Its specificity of hiding the existence of secret information supports newlineits application in securing the data in the modern era. Video Steganography provides a safe way of newlinetransmission by concealing the secret data inside video frames. It is supported by real-time newlineavailability; significant growth has been noticed in choosing video as a carrier file in the last newlinedecade. It was observed by the study of the literature relevant to video steganography that a tradeoff newlineexists in attaining the acceptable values of various evaluation parameters like robustness, newlineimperceptibility, flexibility, capacity, security, complexity, concealing, and retrieval time. newlineResolving this trade-off among the required parameters formed the basis of problem formulation. newlineIn this research, a novel and optimized robust video steganography technique having high capacity newlineis developed and implemented. The capacity is increased by pre-processing the secret data using newlineSingular Value Decomposition compression. The large size and dynamic nature of video carrier newlinefiles also help to improve concealing capacity as well as robustness. Also, to maintain the required newlinerobustness and imperceptibility, the concealing of secret data is confined to the Region of Interest newline(ROI) rather than spreading over the entire video frame. Consequently, the computational expenses newlineof this hybrid approach got increased. The resultant hybrid technique is optimized using Integer newlineWavelet Transform as a core embedding technique. The use of the Integer Wavelet for embedding newlineinherently supports the attainment of required concealing and retrieval time. MATLAB 2017 is newlinepreferred for implementing the work because of its wide acceptability and a large set of libraries. newlineThe results obtained were then analyzed using the parameters like, concealing capacity, concealing newlinetime, retrieval time, the measure of robustness, histogram analysis, entropy, frequency spectrum, newlineand visual inspection analysis. The outcome of the analysis supports the attainment of the research newlineobjectives laid down initially. The developed optimized hybrid technique can hide data at the rate newlineof 52 bps. The average concealing and retrieval time for the MP4 file is calculated as 0.857 seconds newlineand 0.552 seconds respectively. The entropy for the carrier video frame is calculated to be 7.77774 newlineand for the stego video frame is 7.78416. Additionally, the novel video steganography technique newlinedeveloped in this research work is compared with some of the existing techniques of video newlinesteganography. The comparison results witness the improved performance of the research work newlinecomparatively. newline