A steganographic method for hiding data in VQ encoded images

A novel image-hiding scheme based on the vector quantization scheme is proposed in this paper. Multiple codebooks are used in this scheme and the mutual relationship between a pair of VQ indices is exploited to hide secret data. The secret data are embedded in the codebook indices corresponding to the pair of VQ indices. The hidden secret data can be extracted by decoding the VQ compressed codes. Experimental results show that the embedding capacity and image quality are superior to Jo and Kim's (2002) scheme. Besides, in the proposed scheme, the image quality based on embedding the same amount of secret data is always better than the compared scheme.