A JPEG-Compression Resistant Adaptive Steganography Based on Relative Relationship between DCT Coefficients

Abstract

Current typical adaptive Steganography algorithms cannot extract the embedded secret messages correctly after compression. In order to solve this problem, a JPEG-compression resistant adaptive steganography algorithm is proposed. Utilizing the relationship between DCT coefficients, the domain of messages embedding is determined. The modifying magnitude of different DCT coefficients can be determined according to the quality factors of JPEG compression. To ensure the completely correct extraction of embedded messages after JPEG compression, the RS codes is used to encode the messages to be embedded. Besides, based on the current energy function in the PQe steganography and the distortion function in J-UNIWARD Steganography, the corresponding distortion value of DCT coefficients is calculated. With the help of that, STCs is used to embed the encoded messages into the DCT coefficients, which have a smaller distortion value. The experimental results under different quality factors of JPEG compression and different payloads demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only has a high correct rate of extracted messages after JPEG compression, which increases from about 60% to nearly 100% comparing with J-UNIWARD steganography under quality factor 75 of JPEG compression, but also has a strong detection resistant performance.