Cellular communications constitute a significant portion of the global telecommunications market. Therefore, the need for secured communication over a mobile platform has increased exponentially. Steganography is an art of hiding critical data into an innocuous signal, which provide answers to the above needs. The JPEG is one of commonly used format for storing and transmitting images on the web. In addition, the pictures captured using mobile cameras are in mostly in JPEG format. In this article, we introduce a switching theory based steganographic system for JPEG images which is applicable for mobile and computer platforms. The proposed algorithm uses the fact that energy distribution among the quantized AC coefficients varies from block to block and coefficient to coefficient. Existing approaches are effective with a part of these coefficients but when employed over all the coefficients they show there ineffectiveness. Therefore, we propose an approach that works each set of AC coefficients with different frame work thus enhancing the performance of the approach. The proposed system offers a high capacity and embedding efficiency simultaneously withstanding to simple statistical attacks. In addition, the embedded information could be retrieved without prior knowledge of the cover image. Based on simulation results, the proposed method demonstrates an improved embedding capacity over existing algorithms while maintaining a high embedding efficiency and preserving the statistics of the JPEG image after hiding information.

Date Published: 2 May 2007
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 6579, Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing for Military and Security Applications 2007, 65790C (2 May 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.719014

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6579:
Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing for Military and Security Applications 2007
Sos S. Agaian; Sabah A. Jassim, Editor(s)