Human visual system-based color image steganography using the contourlet transform

Abstract

We present a steganographic scheme based on the contourlet transform which uses the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) to control the force of insertion of the hidden information in a perceptually uniform color space. The CIELAB color space is used as it is well suited for steganographic applications because any change in the CIELAB color space has a corresponding effect on the human visual system as is very important for steganographic schemes to be undetectable by the human visual system (HVS). The perceptual decomposition of the contourlet transform gives it a natural advantage over other decompositions as it can be molded with respect to the human perception of different frequencies in an image. The evaluation of the imperceptibility of the steganographic scheme with respect to the color perception of the HVS is done using standard methods, the structural similarity (SSIM) and CIEDE2000. The robustness of the inserted watermark is tested against JPEG compression.

Error correcting codes for robust color wavelet watermarking

“…As code rates tends towards 0, the list decoding of Reed-Solomon codes shows asymptotic improvement in performance over the bounded distance algorithms. As generally [5,7,8] the codes rates for watermarking schemes rates are very low, we can therefore employ this asymptotic improvement to our advantage.…”