A Lossless Data Hiding Scheme for VQ Indexes Based on Joint Neighboring Coding

Designing a new reversible data hiding technique with a high embedding rate and a low compression rate for vector quantization (VQ) compressed images is encouraged. This paper proposes a novel lossless data hiding scheme for VQ-compressed images based on the joint neighboring coding technique. The proposed method uses the difference values between a current VQ index and its left and upper neighboring VQ indexes to embed n secret bits into one VQ index, where n = 1, 2, 3, or 4. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves the embedding rates of 1, 2, 3, and 4 bits per index (bpi) with the corresponding average compression rates of 0.420, 0.483, 0.545, and 0.608 bit per pixel (bpp) for a 256 sized codebook. These results confirm that our scheme performs better than other selected reversible data hiding schemes.