HARDWARE PROJECT IN STEGANOGRAPHY

Fujitsu exploitation of steganography : (a) a sketch representing the concept and

(b) the idea deployed into a mobile phone shown at an exhibition
recently

          Inspired by the notion that steganography can be embedded as part of the normal printing process, the Japanese firmFujitsu3 is developing technology to encode data into a printed picture that is invisible to the human eye (data),but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera as exemplified in figure a and shown in action in figure b. The process takes less than one second as the embedded data is merely 12 bytes. Hence, users will be able to use their cellular phones to capture encoded data.

          They charge a small fee for the use of their decoding software which sits on the firm’s own servers. The basic idea is to transform the image colour scheme prior to printing to its hue, saturation and value components (HSV), then embed into the Hue domain to which human eyes are not sensitive. Mobile cameras can see the coded data and retrieve it. This application can be used for “doctor’s prescriptions, food wrappers, billboards, business cards and printed media such as magazines and pamphlets” , or to replace barcodes. The confidence in the integrity of visual imagery has been ruined by contemporary digital technology. This led to further research pertaining to digital document forensics. As an example, Cheddad et al.  proposed a security scheme which protects scanned documents from forgery using self-embedding techniques. The method not only points out forgery but also allows legal or forensics experts to gain access to the original document despite being manipulated.