Reversible data embedding for indices based on histogram analysis

•The proposed scheme achieve better embedding capacity and compression rate.•Acceptable quality of the recovered image is maintained.•Our scheme outperformed schemes of Yang and Lin, Lu et al., and Wang and Lu.

Reversible data hiding is a technique that not only protects the hidden secrets but also recovers the cover media without any distortion after the secret data have been extracted. In this paper, a new reversible data hiding technique for VQ indices which are compressed streams based on the mapping function and histogram analysis of transformed VQ indices is introduced to enhance the performance of some earlier reversible data hiding schemes that are based on VQ indices. As a result, the proposed scheme achieves high embedding capacity and data compression simultaneously. Moreover, the original VQ-compressed image can be perfectly reconstructed after secret data extraction. To estimate the performance of the proposed scheme, variety of test images are used in the experimental testing. As can be seen in the experimental result, our scheme is superior to some previous schemes in term of compression rate and embedding rate while maintaining the reversibility.