Abstract:Steganography payload is one of the four key performance indicators for information hiding. Previous research on information hiding has mainly focused on the other three performance indicators, namely, the robustness, transparency and computational complexity, with very few work being carried out regarding to the steganography payload. This research aims to effectively improve the theoretical system of information hiding. According to the JPEG2000 compression standard and the human eye sensitivity of changing wavelet coefficients, along with the aid of distortion cost function, the study discriminates the wavelet coefficients' carrying capacity of secret information: The smaller the distortion cost function value, the stronger the wavelet coefficients' carrying capacity. Conversely, the larger distortion cost function value, the weaker the wavelet coefficients' carrying capacity. When the distortion cost function value is greater than one, the coefficient will not have enough capacity to carry information, i.e., wet coefficients. By means of the maximum steganography payload experiments along with the bit full embedding, over bits embedding and wet embedding experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed estimation method in this work is verified.