Title: Data hiding in the optimal keyframes using circular shifting and mutation operations for improvement in imperceptibility

Authors: Sahil Gupta; Naresh Kumar Garg

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Maharaja Ranjit Singh Punjab Technical University, Bathinda, Punjab, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Maharaja Ranjit Singh Punjab Technical University, Bathinda, Punjab, India

Abstract: Video steganography hides the information in the cover video and helps in a secure communication over the unsecured network. The existing steganography methods are lacking in terms of efficient keyframe selection algorithm and also show less imperceptibility. The proposed method used the Kullback Leibler divergence (KLD) and edge features to extract the keyframes from any type of video dataset whereas circular shifting and mutation operations are used to improve the imperceptibility. The circular shifting operation helps in searching for the optimal direction of secret data, whereas the mutation operation was deployed to adjust the pixel values to reduce the variability more. To validate the proposed algorithm, the computations were performed on the standard videos and image datasets. The computational results validate that the proposed algorithm has achieved better imperceptibility in a fewer number of iterations. Furthermore, the keyframes extraction technique helps to increase the security of the proposed system for any type of video dataset.

Keywords: imperceptibility; video steganography; mean square error; MSE; mutation; optimal data hiding; circular shifting; peak signal to noise ratio; PSNR; Kullback Leibler divergence; KLD; edge.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICS.2023.128036

International Journal of Information and Computer Security, 2023 Vol.20 No.1/2, pp.158 - 175

Received: 02 Dec 2021
Accepted: 03 Apr 2022
Published online: 04 Jan 2023 *