Saliency map based image steganography

Steganography is an emerging field for hiding secure data. This is useful in electronics data security domains such as watermarking, copyright, secret number, unauthorized reproduction etc. In this paper we propose a saliency based steganography technique, which uses a statistical block analysis of the saliency map to identify regions for secure data embedding. Saliency computation is also an active research area, and for best result, different techniques are combined to generate the saliency map. Various steganography techniques such as sequential, block, and transform domain do not take into account the variation in perceptual information of an image. In saliency based embedding, visual attention is considered for selecting regions for embedding of secure data. The proposed saliency based steganography provides a new dimension for steganography, where embedding of secure data causes minimum affect on visual objects of an image as well as little distortion in segmentation boundaries.