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

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.