A JPEG compression resistant steganography scheme for raster graphics images

Steganography is the science and art of hiding data into inconspicuous media. Various steganography schemes exist which can be utilized to hide data in digital images without bringing about any perceptible change in the image. Most of these schemes lack the robustness to retain the hidden data after the image has been converted to another format using a lossy compression algorithm. We propose a scheme which hides data in bitmap images, in a way that there is almost no perceptible difference between the original image and this new image and which is also resistant to JPEG compression. In all the tests we were able to retrieve the whole data from an image after we had hidden it in a raster graphics image and the image had been compressed using the JPEG algorithm. JPEG compression is performed independently on blocks of 8x8 pixels in an image while converting it to the JPEG format. The proposed scheme makes use of this property.