Integrating and Securing Video, Audio and Text Using Quaternion Fourier Transform

Abstract

The rapid growth of communication technology encouraged a rapidly rising demand for Internet connectivity. Accordingly, this led to an upsurge in research in the discipline of information security. cryptography plays a significant role in securing and verification of information exchanged via public communication channels. The current paper introduces a novel approach for combining both video, audio and text signals into a single architecture and securing it prior to the process of transmission. The idea behind this approach depends on embedding the color components of each pixel of the video signal in a quaternion number. The fourth component of the quaternion number is occupied with either an audio sample or a textual data. The array of quaternion numbers corresponding to a video frame is converted to the frequency domain, using quaternion Fourier transform, and then multiplied by the quaternion Fourier transform of a digital image. Herby, the selected digital image is used as a complicated secret. The yielded signal is transmitted and when received, both of video, audio and text signals are extracted using simple quaternion mathematics applied to the received signal and a copy of the digital image. A second level of complexity can be added to this approach by applying one of the well-known cryptographic techniques (symmetric or asymmetric) to the samples of the transmitted signal. The suggested approach is implemented using Matlab simulation software and the extracted signals are compared with the original ones using some performance metrics. The obtained results show that the proposed approach is robust and more secure against cryptanalysis attacks without affecting the used bandwidth of the communication channel.