Reversible data hiding in JPEG images based on adjustable padding

In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding scheme that enables an adjustable amount of information to be embedded in JPEG images based on padding strategy. The proposed embedding algorithm only modifies, in a subtle manner, an adjustable number of zero-valued quantised DCT coefficients to embed the message. Hence, compared with a state-of-the-art based on histogram shifting, the proposed scheme has a relatively low distortion to the host images. In addition to this, we found that by representing the message in ternary instead of in binary, we can embed a greater amount of information while the level of distortion remains unchanged. Experimental results support that the proposed scheme can achieve better visual quality of the marked JPEG image than the histogram shifting based scheme. The proposed scheme also outperforms this state-of-the-art in terms of the ease of implementation.