Multilevel Multimedia Security by Integrating Visual Cryptography and Steganography Techniques

Multimedia security facilitates the protection of information in multiple forms of digital data such as text, image, audio and video. Many approaches are available for protecting digital data; these include Cryptography, Steganography, and Watermarking etc. A novel approach is proposed for multimedia data security by integrating Steganography and Visual Cryptography (VC) with the goal of improving security, reliability and efficiency. The proposed technique consists of two phases. The first phase is used to hide the message dynamically in an Cover Image1 by changing the number of bits hidden in RGB channels based on the indicator value. VC schemes conceal the Cover Image2 into two or more images which are called shares. In the second phase two shares are created from a Cover Image2 and the stego image created in the first phase is hidden in these two shares. The shares are safe as they reveal nothing about the multimedia content. The Cover Image2, stego image and the hidden message can be recovered from the shares without involving any complex computation. Experimental results show that the new scheme is simple and retrieves many multimedia contents and accomplishes a high level of security.