Data embedding into pictorial images with less distortion using discrete cosine transform

The style of cryptography in which important data are embedded into image data not to be noticed by outsiders is called video steganography. This paper proposes a new method for embedding data into pictorial images. In this method, the amount of locally embedded data is adaptively varied according to the local characteristics of the original image, and more data will be embedded into the image with less distortion. Using the discrete cosine transform (DCT), data are mainly embedded into high frequency components of the image, which have little influence on the quality of the image. The amount of embedded data is varied depending on DCT components of adjacent areas not to weaken edge lines in the image. We also show the effectiveness of our method by subjective evaluation