A novel scheme for securing image steganography

In this paper, we shall propose a more secure scheme with a larger embedding capacity for image steganography based on vector quantization and discrete cosine transform. Instead of encrypting the whole secret image, our method only encrypts the important features extracted from a secret image and then embeds the encrypted features into a cover image for producing a stego-image. During the work of data encryption and embedment, we introduce the data encryption standard cryptosystem and a pseudo random mechanism to ensure the security of the secret image. Besides, the distortion between the cover image and the stego-image is also imperceptible by the human eye, even when the size of the secret image is as large as that of the cover image. According to the substantial experimental results we shall give later, we can demonstrate the applicability of our method.