No Arabic abstract
Although significant progress in automatic learning of steganographic cost has been achieved recently, existing methods designed for spatial images are not well applicable to JPEG images which are more common media in daily life. The difficulties of migration mostly lie in the unique and complicated JPEG characteristics caused by 8x8 DCT mode structure. To address the issue, in this paper we extend an existing automatic cost learning scheme to JPEG, where the proposed scheme called JEC-RL (JPEG Embedding Cost with Reinforcement Learning) is explicitly designed to tailor the JPEG DCT structure. It works with the embedding action sampling mechanism under reinforcement learning, where a policy network learns the optimal embedding policies via maximizing the rewards provided by an environment network. The policy network is constructed following a domain-transition design paradigm, where three modules including pixel-level texture complexity evaluation, DCT feature extraction, and mode-wise rearrangement, are proposed. These modules operate in serial, gradually extracting useful features from a decompressed JPEG image and converting them into embedding policies for DCT elements, while considering JPEG characteristics including inter-block and intra-block correlations simultaneously. The environment network is designed in a gradient-oriented way to provide stable reward values by using a wide architecture equipped with a fixed preprocessing layer with 8x8 DCT basis filters. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve good security performance for JPEG images against both advanced feature based and modern CNN based steganalyzers.
A great challenge to steganography has arisen with the wide application of steganalysis methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). To this end, embedding cost learning frameworks based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been proposed and achieved success for spatial steganography. However, the application of GAN to JPEG steganography is still in the prototype stage; its anti-detectability and training efficiency should be improved. In conventional steganography, research has shown that the side-information calculated from the precover can be used to enhance security. However, it is hard to calculate the side-information without the spatial domain image. In this work, an embedding cost learning framework for JPEG Steganography via a Generative Adversarial Network (JS-GAN) has been proposed, the learned embedding cost can be further adjusted asymmetrically according to the estimated side-information. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method can automatically learn a content-adaptive embedding cost function, and use the estimated side-information properly can effectively improve the security performance. For example, under the attack of a classic steganalyzer GFR with quality factor 75 and 0.4 bpnzAC, the proposed JS-GAN can increase the detection error 2.58% over J-UNIWARD, and the estimated side-information aided version JS-GAN(ESI) can further increase the security performance by 11.25% over JS-GAN.
JPEG is one of the most widely used image formats, but in some ways remains surprisingly unoptimized, perhaps because some natural optimizations would go outside the standard that defines JPEG. We show how to improve JPEG compression in a standard-compliant, backward-compatible manner, by finding improved default quantization tables. We describe a simulated annealing technique that has allowed us to find several quantization tables that perform better than the industry standard, in terms of both compressed size and image fidelity. Specifically, we derive tables that reduce the FSIM error by over 10% while improving compression by over 20% at quality level 95 in our tests; we also provide similar results for other quality levels. While we acknowledge our approach can in some images lead to visible artifacts under large magnification, we believe use of these quantization tables, or additional tables that could be found using our methodology, would significantly reduce JPEG file sizes with improved overall image quality.
It is a critical issue to reduce the enormous amount of data in the processing, storage and transmission of a hologram in digital format. In photograph compression, the JPEG standard is commonly supported by almost every system and device. It will be favorable if JPEG standard is applicable to hologram compression, with advantages of universal compatibility. However, the reconstructed image from a JPEG compressed hologram suffers from severe quality degradation since some high frequency features in the hologram will be lost during the compression process. In this work, we employ a deep convolutional neural network to reduce the artifacts in a JPEG compressed hologram. Simulation and experimental results reveal that our proposed JPEG + deep learning hologram compression scheme can achieve satisfactory reconstruction results for a computer-generated phase-only hologram after compression.
To reduce the storage requirements, remote sensing (RS) images are usually stored in compressed format. Existing scene classification approaches using deep neural networks (DNNs) require to fully decompress the images, which is a computationally demanding task in operational applications. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a novel approach to achieve scene classification in JPEG 2000 compressed RS images. The proposed approach consists of two main steps: i) approximation of the finer resolution sub-bands of reversible biorthogonal wavelet filters used in JPEG 2000; and ii) characterization of the high-level semantic content of approximated wavelet sub-bands and scene classification based on the learnt descriptors. This is achieved by taking codestreams associated with the coarsest resolution wavelet sub-band as input to approximate finer resolution sub-bands using a number of transposed convolutional layers. Then, a series of convolutional layers models the high-level semantic content of the approximated wavelet sub-band. Thus, the proposed approach models the multiresolution paradigm given in the JPEG 2000 compression algorithm in an end-to-end trainable unified neural network. In the classification stage, the proposed approach takes only the coarsest resolution wavelet sub-bands as input, thereby reducing the time required to apply decoding. Experimental results performed on two benchmark aerial image archives demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the computational time with similar classification accuracies when compared to traditional RS scene classification approaches (which requires full image decompression).
Handling digital images is almost always accompanied by a lossy compression in order to facilitate efficient transmission and storage. This introduces an unavoidable tension between the allocated bit-budget (rate) and the faithfulness of the resulting image to the original one (distortion). An additional complicating consideration is the effect of the compression on recognition performance by given classifiers (accuracy). This work aims to explore this rate-distortion-accuracy tradeoff. As a case study, we focus on the design of the quantization tables in the JPEG compression standard. We offer a novel optimal tuning of these tables via continuous optimization, leveraging a differential implementation of both the JPEG encoder-decoder and an entropy estimator. This enables us to offer a unified framework that considers the interplay between rate, distortion and classification accuracy. In all these fronts, we report a substantial boost in performance by a simple and easily implemented modification of these tables.