A High-Capacity Steganography Scheme for JPEG2000 Baseline System

Abstract

Hiding capacity is very important for efficient covert communications. For JPEG2000 compressed images, it is necessary to enlarge the hiding capacity because the available redundancy is very limited. In addition, the bitstream truncation makes it difficult to hide information. In this paper, a high-capacity steganography scheme is proposed for the JPEG2000 baseline system, which uses bit-plane encoding procedure twice to solve the problem due to bitstream truncation. Moreover, embedding points and their intensity are determined in a well defined quantitative manner via redundancy evaluation to increase hiding capacity. The redundancy is measured by bit, which is different from conventional methods which adjust the embedding intensity by multiplying a visual masking factor. High volumetric data is embedded into bit-planes as low as possible to keep message integrality, but at the cost of an extra bit-plane encoding procedure and slightly changed compression ratio. The proposed method can be easily integrated into the JPEG2000 image coder, and the produced stego-bitstream can be decoded normally. Simulation shows that the proposed method is feasible, effective, and secure.