Abstract JPEG images are widely used in daily life. Reversible data hiding (RDH) in JPEG images is useful for many applications. How to avoid image distortion and preserve file size is very important for RDH in JPEG images. In this paper, a novel RDH scheme is proposed for JPEG images based on improved block ordering and frequency selection. The distortion that may be caused by the data embedding in each block is estimated more accurately based on the DCT coefficient distribution, and the blocks that result in less distortion will be firstly used for data embedding. Moreover, the non-zero AC coefficients with the frequencies having higher embedding efficiency will be used preferentially to further reduce image distortion. Consequently, less side information on frequency selection is needed for data extraction and image recovery with our scheme. Extensive experiments are conducted on several typical images and 500 images randomly selected from BOSSbase image database, and the numerical results demonstrate that better performance in terms of visual quality and file size preservation can be achieved with the proposed scheme compared to the state-of-the-art RDH schemes for JPEG images.

中文翻译：

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改进了 JPEG 图像中可逆数据隐藏的块排序和频率选择

摘要 JPEG 图像在日常生活中被广泛使用。JPEG 图像中的可逆数据隐藏 (RDH) 对许多应用程序都很有用。如何避免图像失真和保持文件大小对于 JPEG 图像中的 RDH 非常重要。在本文中，提出了一种基于改进的块排序和频率选择的 JPEG 图像的新型 RDH 方案。基于DCT系数分布更准确地估计每个块中数据嵌入可能引起的失真，导致失真较小的块将首先用于数据嵌入。此外，将优先使用具有较高嵌入效率的频率的非零交流系数，以进一步减少图像失真。因此，使用我们的方案进行数据提取和图像恢复所需的关于频率选择的辅助信息较少。