Application of bit-plane decomposition steganography to wavelet encoded images

This paper presents a steganography method based on a lossy wavelet compression scheme and bit-plane complexity segmentation (BPCS) steganography. This method utilizes the embedded zerotree wavelet (EZW) compression scheme, where wavelet coefficients of an image are quantized into a bit-plane structure. The proposed steganography enables us to use lossy compressed images as dummy files in bit-plane-based steganographic algorithms. Large embedding rates of around 25% of the compressed image size were achieved with little noticeable degradation in image quality. The proposed method can be applied to other wavelet-based lossy compression schemes like SPIHT and JPEG2000, because in these compression schemes the wavelet coefficients are also quantized into a bit-plane structure.