Spread-spectrum steganographic (SSIS) method offers high payload and robustness to additive noise in transmission channel but the visual quality of image is distorted and exact data recovery may not be satisfied. DCT-domain message hiding based steganographic techniques provide high image imperceptibility and exact data recovery in absence of noise. In this paper, we combined the best of SSIS and DCT-domain hiding to provide high image imperceptibility and robustness to noise. We demonstrate our proposed algorithm through experiments on additive noise and JPEG compression attacks in the transmitted channel.