A Novel Compressed Domain Technique of Reversible Steganography

Abstract

Steganography has been a common mode of secret communication in recent years. Although the steganographic approach can be carried out in either image, audio or video signals, due to the availability of higher degree of redundant data and easy accessibility in transmission mediums, digital images are the prevalent practice of steganography. Generally, information hiding inside a digital image results in deprivation of some visual quality of the image. However, recent advancement in steganographic schemes has been able to develop techniques that can disguise an information within a digital image in such a way that the cover image can be taken to its original state after extracting the hidden information. These techniques are commonly referred to as Lossless Steganography or Reversible Steganography. Although late researches in steganography have been able to successfully conduct reversible steganography in spatial domain, reliable and robust lossless steganographic technique in compressed domain is yet a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel reversible steganographic approach that can hide high capacity secret information in location based compressed domain. The proposed method can completely reconstruct the cover image or host image and provide the best possible perceptual quality. The proposed method can also provide its users with a key for hiding and extracting information so that the robustness is achieved in a great extent.