JPEG Reversible Data Hiding Using Dynamic Distortion Optimizing With Frequency Priority Reassignment

JPEG Reversible data hiding (RDH) aims at correctly extracting hidden data and perfectly recovering the original JPEG image. By combining different frequency selection and block ordering manners, appropriate AC coefficients can be determined to achieve an efficient JPEG RDH scheme using histogram shifting (HS) mechanism. Nevertheless, existing methods only rely on rough frequency band distortion model by involving all DCT blocks, ignoring the dynamic influence of block ordering on embedding block selection. As a result, JPEG image containing hidden data may have an obvious distortion and file size expansion due to an inappropriate frequency band selection. To address the aforementioned problem, we design a new JPEG RDH scheme to optimize distortion model with frequency priority reassignment. Our method firstly orders all DCT blocks by referring to zero AC coefficients of each block. Subsequently, based on the given secret data, only partial ordered blocks are selected to calculate the distortion of each DCT frequency, which can further optimize unit distortion caused by shiftable coefficients. Furthermore, we employ the adjustment parameter to adaptively reassign the priority of each frequency band based on its influence on file size expansion, which can significantly reduce file size expansion of the marked JPEG image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing JPEG RDH methods with better visual quality and smaller file size increment of the marked image.

Automated summary

This article introduces a new JPEG reversible data hiding scheme that improves image quality and reduces file size expansion by optimizing distortion models and reassigning frequency priorities.