Secure video communication using firefly optimization and visual cryptography

In recent years, we face an increasing interest in protecting multimedia data and copyrights due to the high exchange of information. Attackers are trying to get confidential information from various sources, which brings the importance of securing the data. Many researchers implemented techniques to hide secret information to maintain the integrity and privacy of data. In order to protect confidential data, histogram-based reversible data hiding with other cryptographic algorithms are widely used. Therefore, in the proposed work, a robust method for securing digital video is suggested. We implemented histogram bit shifting based reversible data hiding by embedding the encrypted watermark in featured video frames. Histogram bit shifting is used for hiding highly secured watermarks so that security for the watermark symbol is also being achieved. The novelty of the work is that only based on the quality threshold a few unique frames are selected, which holds the encrypted watermark symbol. The optimal value for this threshold is obtained using the Firefly Algorithm. The proposed method is capable of hiding high-capacity data in the video signal. The experimental result shows the higher capacity and video quality compared to other reversible data hiding techniques. The recovered watermark provides better identity identification against various attacks. A high value of PSNR and a low value of BER and MSE is reported from the results.