Secure JPEG2000 Steganography by the Minimization of Code-block Noise Variance Changes

Abstract

JPEG2000 is the upcoming image coding standard that provides better compression rate and image quality compared with JPEG.Lazy-mode steganography guarantees the safe communication under the two information loss stages in JPEG2000. However, it causes the severe changes of the code-block noise variance sequence after embedding and that is detectable under the steganalysis using the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) based sequential analysis. In this paper, a JPEG2000 lazy-mode steganography method is presented. The code blocks which produce the sudden variation of the noise variance after embedding are estimated by calculating low precision code-block variance (LPV) and low precision code-block noise variance (LPNV). By avoiding those code-blocks from embedding, our algorithm preserves the sequence and makes stego images secure under the HHT-based steganalytic detection. In addition, it prevents a severe degradation of image quality by using JPEG2000 quality layer information. On various 2048 images, experiments are performed to show the effective reduction of the noise variation after message embedding and the stable performance against HHT-based steganalysis.