Author : Dipika Nehete and Anant Bhide

Steganography is the art of hiding the secret and confidential data in another transmission medium to achieve secret communication. In this paper steganography method used is based on biometrics. And the biometric feature used to implement steganography is skin portion of images where secret data is embedded within skin region of image. This skin region provides excellent secure location for data hiding, so security is enhanced. For this, firstly skin tone detection is performed on a cover image using HSV (Hue, Saturation and Value) color space and then secret data embedding will be performed by using frequency domain approach – DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform). DWT consist of four frequency sub bands and secret data is hidden in one of the high frequency sub band. This is done by tracking skin pixels in that sub band. Various steps of data hiding are applied by cropping an image interactively. Cropping provides an enhanced security than without cropping i.e. in whole image, so cropped region works as a key at receiving side. Thus hiding the secret data in skin portion of images provides higher security and satisfactory PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio).

Keywords: Biometrics, Cropping, DWT, PSNR, Skin tone detection.