A reversible data hiding scheme for VQ indices using locally adaptive coding

Data hiding is designed to solve the problem of secure information exchange through public networks such as Internet. In this paper, we present an improved reversible data hiding scheme that can recover original VQ indices after data extraction. As with Chang et al.’s scheme, our proposed scheme also depends on the locally adaptive coding scheme. However, experimental results confirm that the hiding capacity of our proposed scheme is around 1.36 bpi in most digital images, which is typically higher than that of Chang et al.’s [17]. Moreover, the average compression rate that can be achieved with our proposed scheme is 0.49 bpp, which outperforms both Lin and Chang’s scheme (0.50 bpp), Tsai (0.50 bpp), Chang et al.’s scheme (0.53 bpp), and Yang and Lin’s scheme (0.53 bpp).

► The proposed scheme depends on the locally adaptive coding scheme. ► The hiding capacity of our proposed scheme is around 1.36 bpi in most digital images. ► The hiding capacity of our proposed scheme is typically higher than that of Chang et al.’s. ► The average compression rate that can be achieved with our proposed scheme is 0.49 bpp. ► The average compression rate of our proposed scheme outperforms four existing schemes.