A proposed color image protection system based on color embedding

Color Hiding is a new term used for both image protection and image compressing. This paper presents a new technique for embedding the color details of an image inside a grayscale scrambled version of the image. Color details of any image consist of three components red, green and blue. The proposed technique determines the number of the most important bits of each component. The technique embeds the extracted most significant bits MSB bits of the image inside a grayscale semi-scrambled version according to level of importance of each color component. The semi-scrambled version of the image has a limited quality to encourage costumers for buying the decoding key. System results have been evaluated using standard quality assessment measures. The proposed system shows desirable results for both decoded and encoded images which indicate the ability of being used in video stream protection.