Reversible Video Steganography Using Quick Response Codes and Modified ElGamal Cryptosystem

2025-08-10

AI Summary

Balancing visual imperceptibility, robustness, and embedding capacity remains challenging in digital video steganography. To address this, this paper proposes a reversible video steganographic method based on the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and multi-level QR codes. Innovatively integrating YUV color space decomposition with wavelet-domain collaborative embedding, the method parallelly embeds ElGamal-encrypted multi-level QR codes into both low-frequency and high-frequency subbands of the Y, U, and V components. Least Significant Bit (LSB) modulation is employed to ensure high-fidelity concealment and perfect reversibility. Experimental results demonstrate an average Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) of 0.912, a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 52.14 dB, and an embedding capacity of 1 bit per pixel (bpp). The scheme exhibits exceptional robustness against Salt & Pepper, Gaussian, Poisson, and Speckle noise attacks, significantly enhancing privacy preservation and data security.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Machine Learning: Multimodal Learning
• Intelligent Robots: State Estimation

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Applications of cryptography
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

The rapid transmission of multimedia information has been achieved mainly by recent advancements in the Internet's speed and information technology. In spite of this, advancements in technology have resulted in breaches of privacy and data security. When it comes to protecting private information in today's Internet era, digital steganography is vital. Many academics are interested in digital video because it has a great capability for concealing important data. There have been a vast number of video steganography solutions developed lately to guard against the theft of confidential data. The visual imperceptibility, robustness, and embedding capacity of these approaches are all challenges that must be addressed. In this paper, a novel solution to reversible video steganography based on DWT and QR codes is proposed to address these concerns. In order to increase the security level of the suggested method, an enhanced ElGamal cryptosystem has also been proposed. Prior to the embedding stage, the suggested method uses the modified ElGamal algorithm to encrypt secret QR codes. Concurrently, it applies two-dimensional DWT on the Y-component of each video frame resulting in LL, LH, HL, and HH sub-bands. Then, the encrypted Low (L), Medium (M), Quantile (Q), and High (H) QR codes are embedded into the HL sub-band, HH sub-band, U-component, and V-component of video frames, respectively, using the LSB technique. As a consequence of extensive testing of the approach, it was shown to be very secure and highly invisible, as well as highly resistant to attacks from Salt & Pepper, Gaussian, Poisson, and Speckle noises, which has an average SSIM of more than 0.91. Aside from visual imperceptibility, the suggested method exceeds current methods in terms of PSNR average of 52.143 dB, and embedding capacity 1 bpp.

Problem

• Enhancing video steganography security using QR codes and modified ElGamal cryptosystem
• Improving embedding capacity and visual imperceptibility in video steganography
• Increasing robustness against noise attacks in reversible video steganography

Innovation

• Uses DWT and QR codes for steganography
• Employs modified ElGamal for encryption
• Embeds data using LSB technique