Defining Joint Distortion for JPEG Steganography.

Recent studies have shown that the non-additive distortion model of Decomposing Joint Distortion ($DeJoin$) can work well for spatial image steganography by defining joint distortion with the principle of Synchronizing Modification Directions (SMD). However, no principles have yet produced to instruct the definition of joint distortion for JPEG steganography. Experimental results indicate that SMD can not be directly used for JPEG images, which means that simply pursuing modification directions clustered does not help improve the steganographic security. In this paper, we inspect the embedding change from the spatial domain and propose a principle of Block Boundary Continuity (BBC) for defining JPEG joint distortion, which aims to restrain blocking artifacts caused by inter-block adjacent modifications and thus effectively preserve the spatial continuity at block boundaries. According to BBC, whether inter-block adjacent modifications should be synchronized or desynchronized is related to the DCT mode and the adjacent direction of inter-block coefficients (horizontal or vertical). When built into $DeJoin$, experiments demonstrate that BBC does help improve state-of-the-art additive distortion schemes in terms of relatively large embedding payloads against modern JPEG steganalyzers.