Improving data hiding within colour images using hue component of HSV colour space

Abstract Data hiding technologies aim to hide the existence of secret information within digital covers such as images by causing unnoticeable degradation to their quality. Reducing the image distortion and increasing the embedding capacity are the main points that the data hiding techniques revolved around. This article proposes two high payload embedding methods with high stego image quality using the Hue‐Saturation‐Value (HSV) colour model. The first method is hue‐based embedding (HBE) that employs the H plane for hiding one or two bits in non‐grey pixels. The second method uses the three HSV components, so it is called three‐planes embedding (TPE). In TPE, one bit is hidden in the least significant bit (LSB) of V of the grey pixels, one or two bits in H of the pixels having low saturation or low brightness and one bit in the LSB of S otherwise. The experiments were conducted on 25 images and the results show that HBE hides more data on average than TPE with its quality reaching 60 dB. TPE achieves quality up to 61 dB and capacity reaches 364 Kb. TPE scores the highest capacity among six state‐of‐the‐art techniques in Red‐Green‐Blue, HSV, Hue‐Saturation‐Intensity and YCbCr spaces with the highest average peak signal to noise ratio midst five of them. By embedding 60, 90, and 120 Kb, this TPE attains the best average quality amid all the methods.