Towards lower bounds on embedding distortion in information hiding

Abstract

We propose two efficient information hiding algorithms in the least significant bits of JPEG coefficients of images. Our algorithms embed information by modifying JPEG coefficients in such a way that the introduced distortion is minimized. We derive the expected value of the additional error due to distortion as a function of the message length and the probability distribution of the JPEG quantization errors of cover images. We have implemented our methods in Java and performed the extensive experiments with them. The experiments have shown that our theoretical predictions agree closely with the actual introduced distortions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.