The goal of this paper is to determine the steganographic ca- pacity of JPEG images (the largest payload that can be un- detectably embedded) with respect to current best stegan- alytic methods. Additionally, by testing selected stegano- graphic algorithms we evaluate the influence of specific de- sign elements and principles, such as the choice of the JPEG compressor, matrix embedding, adaptive
... [Show full abstract] content-dependent selection channels, and minimal distortion steganography using side information at the sender. From our experiments, we conclude that the average steganographic capacity of grayscale JPEG images with quality factor 70 is approxi- mately 0.05 bits per non-zero AC DCT coefficient.