A New Steganography Method for Embedding Message in JPEG Images

Abstract

Steganography is widely applied by information security systems. The aim of steganography is to create a secret and secure channel between the sender and receiver. Steganography is basically performed in the different data types, such as image and video. Given the rapid growth of digital systems and imaging tools, the number of images and transmission of secret information is also growing. JPEG images are very popular because of their smaller size that makes them suitable for the transmission. The steganography procedure in an image can usually be performed in two domain, space domain and transform domain such as Fourier. In this preliminary study, a text steganography technique in JPEG images is presented. The text steganography is carried out on the bits with the least significant value in the discrete matrix, thus the embedded message insertion has less impact on the image quality. In the proposed method, two less significant bits of pixels are used to hide the embedded message in the image. In JPEG compression procedure before encoding, the steganography operation is applied on the image after its transformation from time into the frequency space and exactly(or right away) after the discretization of transformed data. The experimental results suggest that our approach has high capacity performance in comparison with the conventional methods.