Fast Carrier Selection of JPEG Steganography Appropriate for Application

In recent years, the improvement of the security of steganography mainly involves not only carrier security but also distortion function. In the actual environment, the existing method of carrier selection is limited by its complex algorithm and slow running speed, making it not appropriate for rapid communication. This study proposes a method for selecting carriers and improving the security of steganography. JPEG images are decompressed to spatial domain. Then correlation coefficients between two adjacent pixels in the horizontal, vertical, counter diagonal, and major diagonal directions are calculated. The mean value of the four correlation coefficients is used to evaluate the security of each JPEG image. The images with low correlation coefficients are considered safe carriers and used for embedding in our scheme. The experimental results indicate that the stego images generated from the selected carriers exhibit a higher anti-steganalysis capability than those generated from the randomly selected carriers. Under the premise of the same security level, the images with low correlation coefficients have a high capacity. Our algorithm has a very fast running speed, and the running time of a $\mathrm{2048}\mathrm{\times }\mathrm{2048}$ image is less than 1 s.