Anti-compression JPEG steganography over repetitive compression networks

Abstract Existing work on steganography mostly assumes that an image remains unchanged during transmission from the sender to the receiver. This assumption, however, may not hold in the era of the Internet due to unknown compression from the network service providers. As a result, the hidden information cannot be correctly recovered at the receiver. To address the problem, we design a new JPEG steganographic method that can resist repetitive compression during network transmission, without even knowing the compression process controlled by the network service providers. Our method uses a simulated repetitive compression network, and based on its feedback performs adaptive dither adjustment to dynamically modify the DCT coefficients disturbed by the compression process. Stego images generated with our method can be used to successfully extract the original secret messages, even after the stego images pass through multiple unknown compression processes during network transmission. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with existing JPEG steganographic methods, our method can effectively resist repetitive compression, while maintaining a lower bit error rate and strong anti-steganalysis capability.