An investigation of quantization table modification on JPEG steganography

Abstract

Imperceptibility and the embedding capacity are the two most important aspects to be concerned in any image based steganographic research studies. It is necessarily considered to maximize the amount of embedding capacity while preserving the security against detection by unauthorized people in any steganographic methods. Many research studies have exposed that the modified quantization tables significantly reduce the distortion in the quality of stego-images and increase the embedding capacity of stego-images in DCT based steganographic techniques. In this paper, we investigate the aforementioned requirements in JPEG based steganographic techniques with the existing quantization table modification techniques by evaluating the experimental results and derive modified quantization tables to compare the previous results of some existing quantization modification techniques. Our experimental results reveal that the modified tables can provide a significance improvement in information-hiding capacity and visual quality than the other methods tested.