JPEG Noises beyond the First Compression Cycle

TL;DR

This paper investigates JPEG noise characteristics beyond the first compression cycle, revealing different distributions and dependencies on quantization parameters, and demonstrates applications for uncovering JPEG compression history.

Contribution

First statistical analysis of JPEG noises in higher compression cycles, showing their dependence on quantization parameters and enabling history detection.

Findings

Noise distributions differ in higher cycles from the first cycle

Noise characteristics depend on quantization parameters

Applications can accurately uncover JPEG compression history

Abstract

This paper focuses on the JPEG noises, which include the quantization noise and the rounding noise, during a JPEG compression cycle. The JPEG noises in the first compression cycle have been well studied; however, so far less attention has been paid on the JPEG noises in higher compression cycles. In this work, we present a statistical analysis on JPEG noises beyond the first compression cycle. To our knowledge, this is the first work on this topic. We find that the noise distributions in higher compression cycles are different from those in the first compression cycle, and they are dependent on the quantization parameters used between two successive cycles. To demonstrate the benefits from the statistical analysis, we provide two applications that can employ the derived noise distributions to uncover JPEG compression history with state-of-the-art performance.