Biometric Based Secret Data Hiding in Images Using IWT

Abstract – Steganography is the art of hiding the existence of data in another transmission medium to achieve secret communication. Steganography method used in this paper is based on an IWT algorithm to hide the data into cover image. Here we are using the Biometric feature of the cover image to hide the secret data i.e. the skin region of the image that will provide an excellent secure location for hiding the data. Skin tone detection is performed using YCbCrcolor space and the secret data embedding is performed using frequency domain Approach- IWT (Integer Wavelet Transform).Secret data is hidden in one of the high frequency sub-band of IWT by tracing skin pixels in that sub-band. We are embedding additional information to the embedded Image, so that the decoder can retrieve the loss less secret/hide data, this additional embedded data will give sufficient information of the secret and act as a key for the skin tone area where secret data is hidden. This study shows, that by adopting an object oriented steganography using Image Processing mechanism with some additional information about the encoding message to the decoder, in the sense that, we get a higher security because of cropped image and loss less hidden data at the Decoder. And also satisfactory PSNR (Peak Signal Noise Ratio) is obtained