Reversible Data Hiding Scheme for VQ Indices Based on Absolute Difference Trees

Reversible data hiding is a technique for recovering original images without any distortion after secret data are extracted from the image. The technique continues to attract attention from many researchers. In this paper, we introduce a new reversible data hiding scheme based on the adjacent index differences of vector quantization (VQ) indices. The proposed scheme exploits the differences between two adjacent indices to embed secret data. Experimental results show that our scheme can achieve a lower compression rate than an earlier scheme by Yang and Lin. Our scheme's average compression rate, 0.44 bpp, outperforms that of Yang and Lin's scheme, which averages 0.53 bpp. Moreover, the embedding capacity of our scheme can rise to 1.45 bpi, which also is superior to that of Chang et al.'s scheme [35] (1.00 bpi) Yang and Lin's scheme [27] (0.91 bpi) as well as Chang et al.'s scheme [26] (0.74 bpi).