Steganographic methods focusing on BPCS steganography

Abstract

Steganography is a technique to hide secret information in some other data (we call it a vessel) without leaving any apparent evidence of data alteration. This chapter describes a high capacity steganographic method called bit-plane complexity segmentation (BPCS) steganography. BPCS steganography usually uses an image as the vessel data, and secret information is embedded in the bit-planes of the vessel. This technique makes use of the characteristics of the human vision system whereby a human cannot perceive any shape information in a very complicated binary pattern. We can replace all of the "noise-like" regions in the bit-planes of the vessel image with secret data without deteriorating image quality. The principle and possible applications of BPCS, attacks to BPCS, and BPCS applicable to JPEG2000 images are here addressed. Additionally, histogram preserving JPEG steganography is described, and finally experimental results are given. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.