Non-blind Data hiding for RGB images using DCT-based fusion and H.264 compression concepts

Abstract

Steganography is the field of research that provides innovative solutions to the problem of secure data communication. In this paper, a non-blind data hiding technique is proposed which is based on data fusion between both the cover and the secret images. The proposed embedding process is made in the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain of the cover image. In addition, the cover image undergoes a H.264 compression as a pre-processing step for the sake of spatial redundancy reduction. Experimental results showed that the proposed method allows an image to hide another one that is as large as itself while maintaining a remarkably outstanding invisibility performance. Furthermore, a comprehensive comparison showed that the proposed method outperformed a number of similar techniques not only in imperceptibility but also with respect to the hiding capacity.