New quantization matrices for JPEG steganography
Yesna O. Yildiz, Karen A. Panetta, Sos С. Agaian · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
Modern steganography is a secure communication of information by embedding a secret-message within a "cover" digital multimedia without any perceptual distortion to the cover media, so the presence of the hidden message is indiscernible. Recently, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) format attracted the attention of researchers as the main steganographic format due to the following reasons: It is the most common format for storing images, JPEG images are very abundant on the Internet bulletin boards and public Internet sites, and they are almost solely used for storing natural images. Well-known JPEG steganographic algorithms such as F5 and Model-based Steganography provide high message capacity with reasonable security. In this paper, we present a method to increase security using JPEG images as the cover medium. The key element of the method is using a new parametric key-dependent quantization matrix. This new quantization table has practically the same performance as the JPEG table as far as compression ratio and image statistics. The resulting image is indiscernible from an image that was created using the JPEG compression algorithm. This paper presents the key-dependent quantization table algorithm and then analyzes the new table performance.