Reversible Data Hiding for JPEG Images Based on Quantization-Table-Modification and STC

Reversible data hiding (RDH) for JPEG images has attracted extensive attentions in recent years. Particularly, quantized-DCT-coefficients-modification and quantization-table-modification are two main approaches for JPEG images RDH. However, for quantization-table-modification based methods, as lack of accurate measurement for the embedding distortion, its performance is far from optimal. Then, by incorporating syndrome-trellis-code (STC) into quantization-table-modification, a novel and efficient JPEG images RDH method is proposed in this paper. Specifically, by designing diverse reversible embedding rules with STC, the corresponding capacity-distortion model is established. In this way, the embedding distortion is well controlled, and the embedding performance is enhanced. Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide better visual quality compared with some state-of-the-art methods.