Biometrics based Steganography using Circular Folding in DWT Domain

Steganography is the art and science of hiding or embedding data in a transmission medium. The goal of steganography is to hide an information message inside a harmless cover medium in such a way that it is not possible even to detect that there is a secret message. In this paper, the object oriented steganography is based on biometrics. Data is embedded into some regions of the skin and not to the whole region. To separate the skin and non-skin regions, skin tone detection is performed using HSV color space. To increase the security, cropping and circular folding is performed on the B plane of the cover image. The secret data is embedded into the high frequency sub-band coefficients of DWT domain. Because human eyes are less sensitive in this sub-band, security is improved. In this paper, we analyze both cropping and non-cropping cases. This results into more security with cropping than without cropping with almost same PSNR.