Reversible data hiding for JPEG images with a cascaded structure

Since Joint Photographic Experts Group is a typical image compression standard, so the reversible data hiding research on Joint Photographic Experts Group has received a lot of attention. There are two main research methods in Joint Photographic Experts Group‐reversible data hiding: the method based on modifying DCT coefficients and the method based on variable length coding mapping. The disadvantage of the first one is that the visual loss is always inevitable during the DCT‐coefficient modification process, while the second method often has insufficient embedding capacity and excessive file expansion. In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a cascaded reversible data hiding scheme, which builds a distortion minimisation scheme based on the DCT coefficients, and then cascades a file expansion suppression scheme based on the variable length coding mapping. For a particular case during the payload distribution, in this paper, all the secret information is embedded into DCT coefficients with a distortion minimisation scheme, and then the auxiliary information generated in the previous process is embedded in the variable length coding sequence with a scheme to optimise the file size expansion. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in high‐quality factor circumstances in terms of visual quality and file expansion.