Recently, embedding a large amount of secret data into gray-level and color images with low distortion has become an important research issue in steganography. In this paper, we propose a data embedding scheme by using a well-known genetic algorithm, block truncation code and modification direction techniques to embed secret data into compression codes of color images to expand the variety of cover media. In the scheme, the common bitmap generation procedure of GA-AMBTC has been modified to speed up the hiding procedure. Two embedding strategies are proposed to hide secret data into the common bitmap and the quantization values in each block of the cover image. Experimental results confirm that the proposed scheme can provide high data capacity with acceptable image quality of the stego-images. Moreover, the compression ratio of the scheme is exactly the same as that of GA-AMBTC so that attackers cannot detect any trace of hidden data from the size of the modified compressed result.
