Presentation: Data Hiding Tools for Digital Forensics Experts

Abbas Cheddad
School of Computing and Intelligent Systems
Faculty of Computing and Engineering
University of Ulster at Magee, BT48 7JL
Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Emails: cheddad-a@email.ulster.ac.uk

Joan Condell
School of Computing and Intelligent Systems
Faculty of Computing and Engineering
University of Ulster at Magee, BT48 7JL
Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

Kevin Curran
School of Computing and Intelligent Systems
Faculty of Computing and Engineering
University of Ulster at Magee, BT48 7JL
Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

Paul Mc Kevitt
School of Computing and Intelligent Systems
Faculty of Computing and Engineering
University of Ulster at Magee, BT48 7JL
Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
 

ABSTRACT

Much research has been done in the area of steganography which is the science of concealing data in a transmission medium in such a way that it would not draw the attention of eavesdroppers. Steganography has various useful applications such as for human rights organizations (since encryption is prohibited in some countries), smart IDs where individuals’ details are embedded in their photographs (content authentication), data integrity by embedding checksum, medical imaging and secure transmission of medical data to name a few. For decades people strove to develop innovative methods for secret communication. The majority of existing techniques suffer from intolerance to any kind of geometric distortion applied to the stego-image. For instance, if rotation or translation occurs, all of the hidden data will be lost. A remedy to this problem could be achieved through incorporating computer vision into the process as proposed in this short briefing paper.

Keywords: Digital Image Steganography; Self-embedding; Dithering; Security; CCTV; Forensics