JPEG Steganography: A Performance Evaluation of Quantization Tables

The two most important aspects of any imagebased steganographic system are the imperceptibility and the capacity of the stego image. This paper evaluates the performance and efficiency of using optimized quantization tables instead of default JPEG tables within JPEG steganography. We found that using optimized tables significantly improves the quality of stego-images. Moreover, we used this optimization strategy to generate a 16x16 quantization table to be used instead of that suggested in [1]. The quality of stego-images was greatly improved when these optimized tables were used. This led us to suggest a new hybrid steganographic method in order to increase the embedding capacity. This new method is based on both [1] and Jpeg-Jsteg methods. In this method, for each 16x16 quantized DCT block, the least twosignificant bits (2-LSBs) of each middle frequency coefficient are modified to embed two secret bits. Additionally, the Jpeg-Jsteg embedding technique is used for the low frequency D...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: AINA
• Authors: Adel Almohammad, Gheorghita Ghinea, Robert M. Hierons
• Keywords: AINA 2009, Computer Networks, Default Jpeg Tables, Optimized Tables, Quantization Table