An ECC/DCT-Based Robust Video Steganography Algorithm for Secure Data Communication

Nowadays, the science of information hiding has gained tremendous significance due to advances in information and communication technology. The performance of any steganographic algorithm relies on the embedding efficiency, embedding payload, and robustness against attackers. Low hidden ratio, less security, and low quality of stego videos are the major issues of many existing steganographic methods. In this paper, we propose a novel video steganography method in discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain based on error correcting codes (ECC). To improve the security of the proposed algorithm, a secret message is first encrypted and encoded by using Hamming and BCH codes. Then, it is embedded into the DCT coefficients of video frames. The hidden message is embedded into DCT coefficients of each Y, U, and V planes excluding DC coefficients. The proposed algorithm is tested under two types of videos that contain slow and fast moving objects. The experiential results of the proposed algorithm are compared with three existing methods. The comparison results show that our proposed algorithm outperformed other algorithms. The hidden ratio of the proposed algorithm is approximately 27.53%, which is considered as a high hiding capacity with a minimal tradeoff of the visual quality. The robustness of the proposed algorithm was tested under different attacks.