Biometric Steganographic Technique Using DWT and Encryption

Steganography is the art of hiding the existence of data inanother transmission medium to achieve secret communication . Steganography method used in this paper is based on biometrics, ie biometric steganography. And the biometric feature used to implement steganography is skin tone region of images. Here secret data is embedded within skin region of image that will provide an excellent secure location for data hiding. Before embedding secret data is needed to be encrypted using stream cipher encryption scheme RC4.Skin color tone detection is performed by using HSV color space.DWT is the frequency domain in which this biometric steganography is implemented.Secret data is embedded in one of the high frequency subband by tracing the number of skin pixels in that band. Different embedding steps are embedded on the cropped region of the image.ie value of this cropped region will act as a key at the decoder side. This study shows that by adopting an object oriented steganography mechanism, in the sense that, we track skin tone objects in image, we get a higher security. . And also satisfactory PSNR (PeakSignal-to-Noise Ratio) is obtained Keywords— Biometrics,Skin tone detection,DWT, cropping,PSNR,RC4.