Compression-Efficient Reversible Data Hiding in Zero Quantized Coefficients of JPEG Images

Abstract

In this paper, we study reversible data hiding schemes for JPEG images and we propose a method which is constructed by embedding secret data into zero quantized coefficients. In the proposed method, consecutive zero quantized coefficients in a fixed set of entries of DCT block are used to embed data in the following way. First, the algorithm selects several positions from this fixed set according to the first part of the secret message and modifies selected zero coefficients by small non-zero values according to the second part of the secret message. Experimental results show that our proposed methods have higher embedding capacity and obtain lower ratios between the increased file size and payload than previous methods.