A new technique of hiding a speech signal clip inside a digital color image is proposed in this paper to improve steganography security and loading capacity. The suggested technique of image steganography is achieved using both spatial and cepstral domains, where the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are adopted, as very efficient features of the speech signal. The presented technique in this paper contributes to improving the image steganography features through two approaches. First is to support the hiding capacity by the usage of the extracted MFCCs features and pitches extracted from the speech signal and embed them inside the cover color image rather than directly hiding the whole samples of the digitized speech signal. Second is to improve the data security by hiding the secret data (MFCCs features) anywhere in the host image rather than directly using the least significant bits substitution of the cover image. At the recovering side, the proposed approach recovers these hidden features and using them to reconstruct the speech waveform again by inverting the steps of MFCCs extraction to recover an approximated vocal tract response and combine it with recovered pitch based excitation signal. The results show a peak signal to noise ratio of 52.4 dB of the stego-image, which reflect a very good quality and a reduction ratio of embedded data to about (6%–25%). In addition, the results show a speech reconstruction degree of about 94.24% correlation with the original speech signal
