Data Hiding in Digital Video

With the rapid development of digital multimedia technologies, an old method which is called steganography has been sought to be a solution for data hiding applications such as digital watermarking and covert communication. Steganography is the art of secret communication using a cover signal, e.g., video, audio, image etc., whereas the counter-technique, detecting the existence of such as a channel through a statistically trained classifier, is called steganalysis. The state-of-the art data hiding algorithms utilize features; such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients, pixel values, motion vectors etc., of the cover signal to convey the message to the receiver side. The goal of embedding algorithm is to maximize the number of bits sent to the decoder side (embedding capacity) with maximum robustness against attacks while keeping the perceptual and statistical distortions (security) low. Data Hiding schemes are characterized by these three conflicting requirements: security against steganalysis, robustness against channel associated and/or intentional distortions, and the capacity in terms of the embedded payload. Depending upon the application it is the designer\u27s task to find an optimum solution amongst them. The goal of this thesis is to develop a novel data hiding scheme to establish a covert channel satisfying statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate capacity and robustness to combat steganalysis based detection. The idea behind the proposed method is the alteration of Video Object (VO) trajectory coordinates to convey the message to the receiver side by perturbing the centroid coordinates of the VO. Firstly, the VO is selected by the user and tracked through the frames by using a simple region based search strategy and morphological operations. After the trajectory coordinates are obtained, the perturbation of the coordinates implemented through the usage of a non-linear embedding function, such as a polar quantizer where both the magnitude and phase of the motion is used. However, the perturbations made to the motion magnitude and phase were kept small to preserve the semantic meaning of the object motion trajectory. The proposed method is well suited to the video sequences in which VOs have smooth motion trajectories. Examples of these types could be found in sports videos in which the ball is the focus of attention and exhibits various motion types, e.g., rolling on the ground, flying in the air, being possessed by a player, etc. Different sports video sequences have been tested by using the proposed method. Through the experimental results, it is shown that the proposed method achieved the goal of both statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate embedding capacity under AWGN channel with varying noise variances. This achievement is important as the first step for both active and passive steganalysis is the detection of the existence of covert channel. This work has multiple contributions in the field of data hiding. Firstly, it is the first example of a data hiding method in which the trajectory of a VO is used. Secondly, this work has contributed towards improving steganographic security by providing new features: the coordinate location and semantic meaning of the object

Multi-biometric templates using fingerprint and voice

As biometrics gains popularity, there is an increasing concern about privacy and misuse of biometric data held in central repositories. Furthermore, biometric verification systems face challenges arising from noise and intra-class variations. To tackle both problems, a multimodal biometric verification system combining fingerprint and voice modalities is proposed. The system combines the two modalities at the template level, using multibiometric templates. The fusion of fingerprint and voice data successfully diminishes privacy concerns by hiding the minutiae points from the fingerprint, among the artificial points generated by the features obtained from the spoken utterance of the speaker. Equal error rates are observed to be under 2% for the system where 600 utterances from 30 people have been processed and fused with a database of 400 fingerprints from 200 individuals. Accuracy is increased compared to the previous results for voice verification over the same speaker database

Robusna procedura za umetanje vodenog žiga u sliku zasnovana na Hermitovoj projekcijskoj metodi

A procedure for combined image watermarking and compression, based on the Hermite projection method is proposed. The Hermite coefficients obtained by using the Hermite expansion are used for watermark embedding. The image can be efficiently reconstructed by using a set of Hermite coefficients that is quite smaller than the number of original ones. Hence, the watermark embedding is actually done in the compressed domain, while maintaining still high image quality (measured by high PSNR). The efficiency of the proposed procedure is proven experimentally, showing high robustness even for very strong standard attacks. Moreover, the method is robust not only to the standard attacks, but to the geometrical attacks, as well. The proposed approach can be suitable for different copyright and ownership protection purposes, especially in real-applications that require image compression, such as multimedia and Internet applications, remote sensing and satellite imaging.U radu je predložena procedura za umetanje vodenog žiga u sliku i kompresiju slike zasnovana na Hermitovoj projekcijskoj metodi. Odgovarajući koeficijenti, dobiveni kao rezultat primjene razvoja slike u red Hermitovih funkcija, korišteni su za umetanje vodenog žiga watermark). S obzirom na to da se slika može efikasno rekonstruirati korištenjem znatno manjeg broja Hermitovih koeficijenata u odnosu na broj originalnih koeficijenata slike, umetanje vodenog žiga zapravo je provedeno u domeni kompresije, uz očuvanje visoke kvalitete slike (velika vrijednost PSNR). Učinkovitost predložene procedure ispitana je eksperimentalno i pokazuje značajnu otpornost na uobičajene napade. Osim uobičajenih, procedura pokazuje robusnost i na geometrijske napade. Predloženi pristup može biti korišten u različitim aplikacijama za zaštitu autorskih prava, naročito u aplikacijama koje ujedno zahtijevaju i kompresiju slike, kao što su multimedijske i internetske aplikacije, daljinsko očitavanje podataka i satelitska snimanja