A Novel Block Sorting Scheme for Reversible Data Hiding in JPEG Images

Nowadays, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) is the most popular compressed image format that is widely used in various fields. Therefore, reversible data hiding techniques for JPEG images are necessary for data communication and image authentication. In this paper, a novel scheme of reversible data hiding in JPEG images is proposed. The proposed scheme embeds data into the JPEG quantized 8 x 8 block DCT coefficients based on the histogram shifting method. In order to further reduce the distortion, new block selection strategy according to the number of zero AC coefficients and the smoothness in each 8 x 8 blocks is proposed. Compared to the current state-of-the-art method, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has better performance in term of both the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and limiting the increased file size growth after data embedding.