Currently, cellular phones constitute a significant portion of the global telecommunications market. Modern cellular phones offer sophisticated features such as Internet access, on-board cameras, and expandable memory which provide these devices with excellent multimedia capabilities. Because of the high volume of cellular traffic, as well as the ability of these devices to transmit nearly all forms of data. The need for an increased level of security in wireless communications is becoming a growing concern. Steganography could provide a solution to this important problem. In this article, we present a new algorithm for JPEG-compressed images which is applicable to mobile platforms. This algorithm embeds sensitive information into quantized discrete cosine transform coefficients obtained from the cover JPEG. These coefficients are rearranged based on certain statistical properties and the inherent processing and memory constraints of mobile devices. Based on the energy variation and block characteristics of the cover image, the sensitive data is hidden by using a switching embedding technique proposed in this article. The proposed system offers high capacity while simultaneously withstanding visual and statistical attacks. Based on simulation results, the proposed method demonstrates an improved retention of first-order statistics when compared to existing JPEG-based steganographic algorithms, while maintaining a capacity which is comparable to F5 for certain cover images.

Date Published: 2 May 2006
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 6250, Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing for Military and Security Applications, 62500F (2 May 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.663816

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6250:
Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing for Military and Security Applications
Sos S. Agaian; Sabah A. Jassim, Editor(s)