Steganography using JPEG-compressed images

In this paper, a novel steganographic method based on JPEG is proposed. We take advantage of the quantization error resulting from processing the JPEG-compressed image with two different scaling factors. One of the scaling factors is used to control the bit rate of the stego-image while the other is used to guarantee the quality of the stego-image. Our experimental results show that the proposed steganographic method can provide a high information hiding capacity and successfully control the compression ratio and distortion of the stego-image.