A Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for JPEG Images

When JPEG images are used as cover objects for data hiding, many existing techniques require the images to be fully or partially decompressed before embedding. This makes practical application of these methods limited. In this paper, we investigate ways to hide data in the compressed domain directly and efficiently, such that both the original content and the embedded message can be recovered at the same time during decompression. We propose a method to embed bits into selected components of the compressed data such that it does not require decompression of the JPEG images and introduces very little change to the original JPEG files. The proposed method can be implemented efficiently and it is possible to perform embedding and detection in a single pass, so that JPEG streams can be processed in real-time without waiting for the end of the data.