A high capacity reversible data hiding method for 2D vector maps based on virtual coordinates

•We develop a high capacity reversible data hiding method for 2D vector maps.•Virtual coordinates are exploited to expand the capacity.•The data capacity achieves nearly 2c2c(c≥1)(c≥1) bits/vertex.•The reversibility, invisibility, and computational complexity are good.•For polylines and polygons, content preserving operations can be resisted.

In this paper, we propose a high capacity reversible data hiding method for 2D vector maps based on virtual coordinates. In the scheme, we calculate two virtual coordinates for each eligible   coordinate, and embed cc (c≥1c≥1) secret bits by modifying the state value of the interval which is created by the two corresponding virtual   coordinates. Since nearly every coordinate can carry cc bits, the data capacity in bits achieves nearly 2c2c times the number of vertices in the vector map. In addition, to resist content preserving operations, the vertex traversing order is defined. Experimental results and analysis show that the proposed method provides good reversibility, invisibility and computational complexity and is robust against the feature rearrangement and vertex reversing attacks for polylines and polygons.