Hiding traces of double compression in JPEG images based on Tabu Search

With the development of digital forensic techniques, the image disguise (also called image tampering or image manipulation) is challenged greatly. When the tampered JPEG image is saved, it was re-compressed. This progress causes radical change in the histogram of the discrete cosine transformation (DCT) coefficients. The amounts of some coefficient values decrease greatly or even disappear. It is easily to detect this pattern by statistics methods. To remove the fragility of image disguise, we need to revise the abnormal distribution of DCT coefficients. But random change in the coefficient values degrades the image quality. So we established an image disguising evaluation model aims at the JPEG recompression detection which can be solved by Tabu Search algorithm. Under the restraint of the evaluation model, the traces of double compression are removed, and the image quality is well preserved.