A Resilient Approach to Robust JPEG Steganography: Ensuring Hidden Data Integrity

Modern-day steganography algorithms leveraging the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) images have made impressive progress in achieving imperceptibility and undetectability by employing cost-effective embedding techniques. However, these algorithms often fall short in effectively addressing the challenges posed by JPEG recompression, limiting their practical viability. To transcend this limitation, the paper introduces a novel method that judiciously embeds confidential data in discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients to enhance robustness. Experimental results demonstrate superiority of the proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Under JPEG recompression with same quality factor, the technique achieves less than 1% message extraction error rate in most test cases, significantly lower than 10-50% error rates of existing methods. Besides, imperceptibility is maintained with PSNR of 51-62 dB. Moreover, by selectively modifying DCT coefficients, computational time is reduced to tens of milliseconds. These advancements hold great potential for various real-world applications, including secure communication over social networking platforms, where JPEG re-compressions are prevalent.