New JPEG Steganographic Scheme with High Security Performance

In this paper, we present a new JPEG steganographic scheme. Three measures are taken in our method: 1) The secret message bits are not spread into the quantized block discrete cosine transform (BDCT) coefficients of all frequencies, and only those coefficients (including those of value 0) belonging to relatively low frequencies are selected for data embedding; 2) For any coefficients selected for embedding, the rounding error in JPEG quantization is utilized directly to guide the data embedding; 3) Matrix embedding. The experiments have demonstrated that these three measures can help to achieve small distortion in spatial domain, preserve the histogram of quantized block discrete cosine transform coefficients, and enhance the embedding efficiency of matrix embedding, etc. Consequently, the proposed steganographic scheme has achieved a high security performance. It can resist today's most powerful JPEG steganalyzers effectively.