Skin tone based Steganography in video files exploiting the YCbCr colour space

Previous studies have shown that Steganography tools such as the S-Tools application outperforms counterpart tools in hiding data in the spatial domain. Another tool called F5 is identified as a robust tool in implementing Steganography in the frequency domain. This paper presents a Steganographic system which exploits the YCbCr colour space. YCbCr is intended to take advantage of human colour-response characteristics. Results show that our algorithm outperforms both F5 and S-Tools. Moreover, our system demonstrates improved performance in retrieving the hidden data after applying image processing attacks in the form of additive artificial noise. As a performance measurement for image distortion Peak-Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), which is classified under the difference distortion metrics, can be applied to the Stego images. This study also shows that by adopting an object oriented Steganography mechanism, in the sense that we track skin tone objects in video frames, we get a higher PSNR value.