An efficient JPEG steganographic scheme based on the block entropy of DCT coefficients

Steganography is the art of covert communication. This paper presents an efficient JPEG steganography scheme based on the block entropy of DCT coefficients and syndrome trellis coding (STC). The proposed cost function explores both the block complexity and distortion effects due to flipping and rounding errors. The STC provides multiple solutions to embed messages to a block of coefficients. The proposed scheme determines the best one with minimal distortion effect. In this way, the total distortions are significantly reduced, which corresponds to less detectability of steganalysis. Compared with similar schemes, experiment results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme in terms of secure embedding capacity against steganalysis.