A channel selection rule for YASS

In this paper, a channel selection rule for YASS (Yet-Another-Secure-Steganography) is proposed. Secret message embedding imposes distortion to the cover image. The larger the distortion, the less secure the steganographic algorithm. Our channel selection rule engages in minimizing this distortion brought in by YASS. In our rule, the distortion caused by unit change on each quantized DCT (Discrete Cosine Transformation) component is computed, and the components with smaller unit change distortion are selected with higher priority. This channel selection rule reduces distortion to the medium spatial domain image and the final JPEG image. Experimental results show that our improved YASS scheme outperforms original YASS scheme on the aspects of both perception and statistics. This new channel selection rule can also be combined with other enhancements in YASS framework to further boost the performance.