Steganographic Framework for Hiding a Color Image into Digital Images

In last years, steganography has been used for security purposes, the main idea is hide information inside some cover media, in such a way that it should be invisible to Human Visual System (HVS). In this paper, we propose a new steganography framework to hide a 24 bits color image inside digital images, where the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is employed to reduce the amount of data representing secret image, and later, this new information is embedded into the middle-frequency DCT coefficients of the cover image, using the Quantization Index Modulation Dither-Modulation (QIM-DM). In experimental results, we have demonstrated that this technique supports JPEG compression attacks; also, the secret information is imperceptible to the human eye according to the obtained PSNR and SSIM values.