Imperceptibility Evaluation for Color Stego Image

The imperceptibility of steganography is one of the most important measures that evaluate the performance of the steganography algorithm. The global evaluation model PSNR which is widely used by most researchers can’t evaluate the performance of steganography algorithm effectively. Lacking of researches on imperceptibility for color stego image is even serious. Based on HVS model and detailed analyzing of color space, color masking weight is computed and then imperceptibility metric CYIQ for color stego image is proposed in the paper. Experimental results show that CYIQ outperforms global PSNR, which reflects the color masking, luminance masking and texture masking of HVS, and CYIQ can be used to measure the imperceptibility of steganography methods.