Rotation Based Reversible Data Hiding for JPEG Images

A reversible data hiding method for JPEG images by rotating the run length coding (RLC) pairs is proposed in this paper. There are two properties of quantized AC coefficients: large magnitude and short run of zero for low frequency subband, and small magnitude and long run of zero for high frequency subband. In the data embedding stage, the original RLC pairs sequence in each block is rotated to different states with a step, which represents the data to be embedded. In data extraction stage, the original RLC sequence can be figured out based on the two properties, and the mapping relationship between the original and rotated RLC pair sequences can be utilized to extract the embedded data. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves good image quality while preserve the JPEG file size.