Morphological decolorization system for colors hiding

Colors Hiding refers to the process where the chromaticity values are processed to be hidden in the achromatic channel. This concept can be found in the literature as color protection. In this paper we propose a new color hiding system based on decolorization. Decolorization refers to eliminating the colors to just few color seeds, used in the colorization process. In this paper the proposed decolorization system depends on extracting the color seeds using morphology operations. The proposed Morphological Decolorization System (MDS) can extract very few seeds — compared to other methods — and results in very qualified colorization. The seeds then are hided in the luminance channel after encoding using Least Significant Bit (LSB) with very few bit planes. The results of the system show very high quality color retrieval with high chromatic compression ratio compared to other literature methods.