Less detectable JPEG steganography method based on heuristic optimization and BCH syndrome coding

This paper presents an efficient JPEG steganography method based on heuristic optimization and BCH syndrome coding. The proposed heuristic optimization technique significantly decreases total distortion by inserting and removing AC coefficients 1 or -1 in the most appropriate positions. The implemented data hiding technique is based on structured BCH syndrome coding. This method achieves multiple solutions for hiding data to a block of coefficients. The proposed data hiding method chooses the best solution with minimum distortion effect. As a result, the total distortion can be significantly reduced, which results in less detectability of the steganalysis. The experiments include the steganalysis of the proposed data hiding methods. The experiment results shows that the proposed heuristic optimization significantly decreases detectability of the steganalysis. The proposed methods also outperform the existing steganography methods.