An Adaptive JPEG Steganographic Method Based on Weight Distribution for Embedding Costs

Steganographic schemes which are based on minimizing an additive distortion function defined the overall impacts after embedding as the sum of embedding costs for individual image element. However, mutual impacts during embedding are often ignored. In this paper, an adaptive JPEG steganographic method based on weight distribution for embedding costs is proposed. The method takes mutual impacts during embedding in consideration. Firstly, an analysis is made about the factors that affect embedding fluctuations among JPEG coefficients. Then the Distortion Update Strategy (DUS) of updating the distortion costs is proposed, enabling to dynamically update the embedding costs group by group. At last, a kind of adaptive JPEG steganographic algorithm is designed combining with the update strategy and well-known additive distortion function. The experimental result illustrates that the proposed algorithm gains a superior performance in the fight against the current state-of-the-art steganalyzers with high-dimensional features.