JPEG Steganography and Synchronization of DCT Coefficients for a Given Development Pipeline

Abstract: This short paper proposes to use the statistical analysis of the correlation between DCT coefficients to design a new synchronization strategy that can be used for cost-based steganographic schemes in the JPEG domain. First, an analysis is performed on the covariance matrix of DCT coefficients of neighboring blocks after a development similar to the one used to generate BossBase. This analysis exhibits groups of uncorrelated coefficients: 4 groups per block and 2 groups of uncorrelated diagonal neighbors together with groups of mutually correlated coefficients groups of 6 coefficients per blocs and 8 coefficients between 2 adjacent blocks. Using the uncorrelated groups, an embedding scheme can be designed using only 8 disjoint lattices. The cost map for each lattice is updated firstly by using an implicit underlying Gaussian distribution with a variance directly computed from the embedding costs, and secondly by deriving conditional distributions from multivariate distributions. The covariance matrix of these distributions takes into account both the correlations exhibited by the analysis of the covariance matrix and the variance derived from the cost. This synchronization scheme enables to obtain a gain of PE of 5% at QF 95 for an embedding rate close to 0.3 bnzac coefficient using DCTR feature sets.