Improved Uniform Embedding for Efficient JPEG Steganography

With the wide application of the minimal distortion embedding framework, a well-designed distortion function is of vital importance. In this paper, we propose an improved distortion function for the generalized uniform embedding strategy, called improved UERD (IUERD). Although the UERD has made great success, there still exists room for improvement in designing the distortion function. As a result, the mutual correlations among DCT blocks are utilized more efficiently in the proposed distortion function, which leads to less statistical detectability. The effectiveness of the proposed IUERD is verified with the state-of-the-art steganalyzer - JRM on the BOSSbase database. Compared with prior arts, the proposed scheme gains favorable performance in terms of secure embedding capacity against steganalysis.