A lossless data embedding technique by joint neighboring coding

Information hiding methods are currently exploited by many researchers for various applications. Proposing an efficient and feasible information hiding method is valuable. This paper presents a new reversible information hiding method for vector quantization (VQ)-compressed grayscale images by using joint neighboring coding (JNC) technique. The proposed method embeds secret data by using the difference values between the current VQ-compressed index and left or upper neighboring indices. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best visual quality of reconstructed images compared with the two related works. In addition, the proposed method obtains as high embedding capacity as Lin and Chang's method, followed by Yang et al.'s method. As for execution speed, Yang et al.'s method is fastest, followed by the proposed method, and then Lin and Chang's method. With respect to bit rate, the proposed method has a little higher bit rate in comparison with the two related works.