Reversible hiding in DCT-based compressed images

This paper presents a lossless and reversible steganography scheme for hiding secret data in each block of quantized discrete cosine transformation (DCT) coefficients in JPEG images. In this scheme, the two successive zero coefficients of the medium-frequency components in each block are used to hide the secret data. Furthermore, the scheme modifies the quantization table to maintain the quality of the stego-image. Experimental results also confirm that the proposed scheme can provide expected acceptable image quality of stego-images and successfully achieve reversibility. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.