High Security and Capacity of Image Steganography for Hiding Human Speech Based on Spatial and Cepstral Domains

  • Yazen A. Khaleel Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Koya University, Danielle Mitterrand Boulevard, Koya KOY45, Kurdistan Region http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5658-1164
Keywords: Image steganography, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, Speech reconstruction

Abstract

A new technique of hiding a speech signal clip inside a digital color image is proposed in this paper to improve steganography security and loading capacity. The suggested technique of image steganography is achieved using both spatial and cepstral domains, where the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are adopted, as very efficient features of the speech signal. The presented technique in this paper contributes to improving the image steganography features through two approaches. First is to support the hiding capacity by the usage of the extracted MFCCs features and pitches extracted from the speech signal and embed them inside the cover color image rather than directly hiding the whole samples of the digitized speech signal. Second is to improve the data security by hiding the secret data (MFCCs features) anywhere in the host image rather than directly using the least significant bits substitution of the cover image. At the recovering side, the proposed approach recovers these hidden features and using them to reconstruct the speech waveform again by inverting the steps of MFCCs extraction to recover an approximated vocal tract response and combine it with recovered pitch based excitation signal. The results show a peak signal to noise ratio of 52.4 dB of the stego-image, which reflect a very good quality and a reduction ratio of embedded data to about (6%–25%). In addition, the results show a speech reconstruction degree of about 94.24% correlation with the original speech signal.

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Author Biography

Yazen A. Khaleel, Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Koya University, Danielle Mitterrand Boulevard, Koya KOY45, Kurdistan Region

Yazen A. Khaleel is an assistant professor; he is an academic staff member in the department of Software Engineering - Faculty of Engineering at Koya University. In 1995 He got his B.Sc. degree in electrical and electronics engineering. He has MSc degree in Signal processing and PhD degree in Electronics and Digital Signal processing. He is a member in Iraqi Engineers syndicate and in Kurdistan Engineering Union. Dr. Yazen has (9) published Journal articles and (3) conference papers [email: yazen.adnan@koyauniversity.org]. [see TAP]

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Published
2020-06-28
How to Cite
Khaleel, Y. A. (2020) “High Security and Capacity of Image Steganography for Hiding Human Speech Based on Spatial and Cepstral Domains”, ARO-THE SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL OF KOYA UNIVERSITY, 8(1), pp. 95-106. doi: 10.14500/aro.10670.