New Channel Selection Rule for JPEG Steganography

In this paper, we present a new channel selection rule for joint photographic experts group (JPEG) steganography, which can be utilized to find the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients that may introduce minimal detectable distortion for data hiding. Three factors are considered in our proposed channel selection rule, i.e., the perturbation error (PE), the quantization step (QS), and the magnitude of quantized DCT coefficient to be modified (MQ). Experimental results demonstrate that higher security performance can be obtained in JPEG steganography via our new channel selection rule.