Bit-plane decomposition steganography combined with JPEG2000 compression

This paper presents a steganography method based on JPEG2000 lossy compression scheme and bit-plane complexity segmentation (BPCS) steganography. In JPEG2000 compression, wavelet coefficients of an image are quantized into a bit-plane structure and therefore BPCS steganography can be applied in the wavelet domain. The proposed JPEC2000-BPCS steganography was implemented using JJ2000 Java software of JPEG2000 compression, with which the program module for BPCS steganography was integrated. The proposed steganography enables us to use JPEG2000 lossy compressed images as dummy files for embedding secret data. Embedding rates of around 15% of the compressed image size were achieved for pre-embedding 1.0bpp compressed images with no visually noticeable degradation in image quality.