HLTD-CSA: Cover selection algorithm based on hybrid local texture descriptor for color image steganography.

Cover selection is one of the important techniques to improve the security of image steganography. However, existing methods mostly focus on cover selection of grayscale image. In this paper, we propose a novel Cover Selection Algorithm of color images based on Hybrid Local Texture Descriptor, named HLTD-CSA. A green-channel related Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is designed which utilizes local statistics of intra-channel and cross-channel correlations efficiently. Besides, Local Phase Quantization is introduced to serve as a complementary component of our improved LBP. To further enhance the performance of cover selection for color image, a hybrid local texture descriptor (HLTD) is obtained by combining these two types of local texture descriptors with a proper combination strategy. Finally, the proposed algorithm selects images which have larger values of HLTD to construct the cover image set. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our method.