Study on Applications of Reversible Information Hiding Algorithms Based on Discrete Cosine Transform Coefficient and Frequency Band Selection in JPEG Image Encryption

With the development of digital media, its security has also been emphasized, and reversible data hiding (RDH) algorithms has been widely studied. This paper studied RDH algorithms for JPEG images, designed a method to embed secret information by frequency band selection based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients, called an improved RDH (IRDH) algorithm, and conducted experiments on the USC-SIPI image set. It was found that the designed RDH algorithm had a higher embedding capacity, with an average embedding capacity of 37 031 bits at quantization factor = 50, as well as a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) value and a lower file size increase (FSI) value, compared with the other methods; the dispersion degree of the data obtained by this algorithm was also low. The results demonstrate the reliability of the IRDH algorithm on JPEG images, which can be extended and applied in practice.