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Steganography-assisted secure localization of smart devices in internet of multimedia things (IoMT)

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Abstract

Steganography is a secure way of communicating secret visual data/information from one place to another via multimedia carriers. Digital steganography, spatial and frequency domain has taken several methods over the past two decades. In this work, we present steganography-assisted secure localization of smart devices for Visual Sensor Network (VSN). The proposed system is based on achromatic-component (Y-Plane) of the YCbCr color space and maximum likelihood estimation algorithm (MLEA) in the spatial domain. Data/information security via multimedia carriers is the main concern in this technological era, if secret information is captured by a Visual Sensor network, (VSN) then the capture information in the case to send from one place to another needs fundamental security to keep the information confidential. In the proposed steganography-assisted Visual Sensor Network (VSN) the camera nodes are intelligent to process the image data and to extract the important information and the rich-description are provided to the system’s user for further action. In the proposed technique first, the input image is rotated on 90 degrees and transformed into YCbCr color space. Furthermore, the secret data is separated into different blocks of the same size based on key giving sub-blocks in Y-Plane, secret information is then encrypted using an MLE algorithm (MLEA) and the corresponding blocks of secret data is embedded in the sub-image of Y-Plane. The experimental results authenticate that the proposed technique does not only boost the visual quality of stegno-images but also delivers good imperceptibility, robustness, and security as compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

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Availability of data and source code

Data sharing not applicable to this article as authors have used publicly available datasets, whose details are included in the “experimental results and discussions” section of this article. Please contact the authors for further requests.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics (AIDA) Lab CCIS Prince Sultan University Riyadh Saudi Arabia. The authors are thankful for the support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Islamia College Peshawar, Peshawar, 25120, Pakistan

    Saira Khan, Naveed Abbas, Mansoor Nasir & Khalid Haseeb

  2. Artificial Intelligence & Data Analytics Lab CCIS, Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, 11586, Saudi Arabia

    Tanzila Saba & Amjad Rehman

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila, 47050, Pakistan

    Zahid Mehmood

Authors
  1. Saira Khan
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  2. Naveed Abbas
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  3. Mansoor Nasir
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  4. Khalid Haseeb
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  5. Tanzila Saba
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  6. Amjad Rehman
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  7. Zahid Mehmood
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All the authors contributed equally.

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Correspondence to Amjad Rehman.

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Khan, S., Abbas, N., Nasir, M. et al. Steganography-assisted secure localization of smart devices in internet of multimedia things (IoMT). Multimed Tools Appl 80, 17045–17065 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09652-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09652-5

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