High-Payload Data Hiding Scheme Based on Ordered Shifting of AC Coefficients for JPEG Images

Abstract

Information security is a crucial issue in the modern data communication environment. Hiding secret data in multimedia is one of the emerging techniques in this research area. By leveraging the popularity of JPEG image format, we propose a data hiding scheme for JPEG compressed images. Several researches have been proposed to hide secret message in the AC coefficients of JPEG codes. However, they restricted the target of embedding to several predefined values of coefficients in order to preserve the file size or improve visual quality of the stego-image. In this paper, we propose a new data hiding scheme based on an ordered shifting of the AC coefficients. With no restriction imposed on the target value, a large amount of data can be embedded without compromising the imperceptibility and increasing the file size significantly. The proposed scheme is compared with the related works in terms of the hiding capacity, the visual quality, and the increase of file size. Good experimental results are obtained.