Steganography is the technique of hiding a confidential message in an ordinary message where the extraction of embedded information is done at its destination. Among the different carrier files formats; digital images are the most popular. This paper presents a Wavelet-based method for hiding secret information in digital images where skin areas are identified and used as a region of interest. The work presented here is an extension of a method published earlier by the authors that utilized a rule-based approach to detect skin regions. The proposed method, proposed embedding the secret data into the integer Wavelet coefficients of the approximation sub-band of the cover image. When compared to the original technique, experimental results showed a lower error percentage between skin maps detected before the embedding and during the extraction processes. This eventually increased the similarity between the original and the retrieved secret image.

2022 5th International Conference on Computing and Informatics (ICCI)