Large capacity and high quality reversible data hiding method based on enhanced side match vector quantization

In recent years, many reversible data hiding techniques have been proposed to solve information security problem. In this paper, we propose a novel reversible data hiding method based on enhanced side-match vector quantization (ESMVQ). We embed as many secret bits into the images compressed by ESMVQ which uses the very small state codebook size of 4 to achieve a large hiding capacity and meanwhile ensure the compressed image quality by introducing a complementary state codebook. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has a large embedding capacity and a good image quality. The experimental results also show that our proposed method outperforms the methods of Chang et al. (IEEE Trans on Circ and Syst for Vi Techno 16(10):1301-1308, 2006), Huang et al. (The Image Sci J 61(2):195-203, 2013), Lee et al. (IEEE Trans on Inf Forensic and Secur 5(4):638-648, 2010) and Wang et al. (Inf Sci 246:69-82, 2013).