  The widespread use of JPEG images makes them good covers for secret messages
storing and transmitting. This paper proposes a new algorithm for embedding
information in JPEG images based on the steganographic QIM method. The main
problem of such embedding is the vulnerability to statistical steganalysis. To
solve this problem, it is proposed to use a variable quantization step, which
is adaptively selected for each block of the JPEG cover image. Experimental
results show that the proposed approach successfully increases the security of
embedding.
