Abstract

Steganography is the science that involves communicating secret data in an appropriate multimedia carrier. The ultimate goal is to conceal the very presence of the embedded data. Current work in the state of the art, whether in the spatial domain or the frequency domain, cannot tolerate any geometrical attacks, e.g., rotation, translation or cropping. This paper discusses a novel scheme whereby computer vision, particularly skin tone detection, is incorporated into the process of steganography to yield an object oriented embedding mechanism. Skin tone information is deemed to be psycho-visually redundant. The paper also discusses two applications of steganography in digital image forensics and the secure transmission of electronic patient records.

Introduction
For decades people strove to develop innovative methods for secret communication: steganography, as an example, came to life under the assumption that if the feature is visible, the point of attack is evident. Steganography is the art and science of hiding data in a transmission medium. It is a sub-discipline of security systems. Although the term steganography has existed for thousands of years, its digital version has come to public consciousness of late. With the boost in computer power, the Internet and with the development of Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Information Theory and Coding Theory, steganography has gone ‘Digital’. In the realm of this digital world, steganography has created an atmosphere of corporate vigilance that has spawned various interesting applications, thus its continuing evolution is guaranteed.

• Abbas Cheddad, Joan Condell,Kevin Curran & Paul Mc Kevitt School of Computing and Intelligent Systems, University of Ulster, Magee, UK

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