A novel high-performance reversible data hiding scheme using SMVQ and improved locally adaptive coding method

Reversible data hiding is a method that not only embeds secret data but also reconstructs the original cover image without distortion after the confidential data are extracted. In this paper, we propose novel reversible data hiding scheme that can embed high capacity of secret bits and recover image after data extraction. Our proposed scheme depends on the locally adaptive coding scheme (LAC) as Chang&Nguyen’s scheme and SMVQ scheme. Experimental results show that the compression rate of our proposed scheme is 0.33 bpp on average. To embed secret bits we propose the normal-hiding scheme and the over-hiding scheme which have an average embedding rate of 2.01 bpi and 3.01 bpi, more than that of Chang&Nguyen’s scheme (1.36 bpi). The normal-hiding scheme and the over-hiding scheme also has high embedding efficiency of 0.28 and 0.36 on average, which are better than that of Chang&Kieu’s scheme (0.12), Chang&Nguyen’s scheme (0.18) and Chang&Nguyen’s scheme (0.16).

•Our proposed scheme uses the combination of LAC and SMVQ index so that the distribution of index’s position has improved.•Our scheme defines a new self-organizing sequence list L1 which can be used to improve the efficiency of our scheme.•Our proposed scheme defines a threshold list THR which can be used to improve the distribution and the compression rate.•We stipulate the index will be update to the second place in L1 which can further improve the performance of our scheme.•There are different coding rules to ensure that the embedding efficiency is kept at a high level.