New high-performance reversible data hiding method for VQ indices based on improved locally adaptive coding scheme

•We propose a new data hiding method using improved locally adaptive coding (ILAS).•ILAS uses the two-dimensional structure of image and correlation of adjacent indices.•Our proposed ILAS can significantly improve the performance of LAS.•Experiments show our method has a better performance compared with other methods.

In this paper, a new high-performance reversible data hiding method for vector quantization (VQ) indices is proposed. The codebook is firstly sorted using the unidirectional static distance-order technique to improve the correlation among the neighboring indices. The two-dimensional structure of image and the high correlation among the neighboring blocks are used to update the self-organized list L in the improved locally adaptive coding scheme (ILAS). Then a new embedding rule according to the complexity of the region at which the current block locates and the position of current block index in the list L is proposed to obtain a better embedding capacity. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method has a better performance in terms of compression rate, embedding capacity and embedding rate compared with the related data hiding methods.