Rotational based rewritable data hiding in JPEG

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel rotational method on AC coefficient pairs to embed data into a JPEG compressed image. The purpose is to improve the carrier capacity while maintaining its original feature in controlling quality degradation. The proposed method exploits two properties in the quantized AC coefficients, namely, large magnitude and short run of zeros for low frequency subbands, and vice versa. The coefficients are first grouped into pairs and then rotated to the left or right directions to create distinctive states, where each can be utilized to represent external data. The AC coefficients are not modified and no additional AC coefficients are introduced for data embedding. However, preprocessing is needed so that all blocks satisfy the properties assumed to ensure correct data extraction and image recovery. The proposed method is rewritable because the host image can be re-utilized without causing further distortion. Experiments were conducted to verify the basic performance of the proposed method. On average, the proposed method is able to embed up to ~9318 bits in the test images of quality factor 80.