Lossless steganography for AMBTC-compressed images

A lossless or reversible steganography is defined as an original image can be completely recovered from the stego-image after the embedded data has been extracted. This technique has been focused on spatial uncompressed domain recently, and is considered more challenging to carry out in the compressed domain. In this paper, we propose a lossless, compressed domain steganography technique for AMBTC-compressed images based on the interchange of two quantization levels. The location map, which is often used in lossless steganography, is not required in our scheme. Therefore, the hiding capacity is independent of the compressed codes. Moreover, the stego-image preserves the same image quality as the original compressed images. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is not only easy to implement but also provides an efficient mechanism for lossless data embedding.