Reversible index-domain information hiding scheme based on side-match vector quantization

Information hiding has become an interesting topic that receives more and more attention. Recently, many hiding techniques were proposed to directly conceal secret information on an image. However, for convenience and efficiency, images are usually stored and compressed by lossy or lossless compression mechanisms in indices format. The hidden information might be erased or cancelled when the stego image is lossy compressed. Hence, this paper proposes an information hiding scheme based on side-match vector quantization (SMVQ), which conceals the secret information on the indices of the SMVQ compressed images. The proposed scheme not only can embed information in the indices of the compressed image with low image distortion, but also can recover the original indices to reconstruct the SMVQ compressed image. As the experimental results indicated, the proposed scheme indeed outperforms other schemes in terms of image quality, hiding capacity, and compression rate. (C) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.