Reversible steganographic method using SMVQ approach based on declustering

Reversible steganography allows an original image to be completely restored after the extraction of hidden data embedded in a cover image. In this paper, we propose a reversible scheme for VQ-compressed images that is based on a declustering strategy and takes advantage of the local spatial characteristics of the image. The main advantages of our method are ease of implementation, low computational demands, and no requirement for auxiliary data. The experimental results show that the embedding capacity of the proposed method is controlled by the number of declustered groups and the spatial characteristics of the cover image. The results also show that the proposed method has the best embedding capacity and the least running time compared with other methods. (C) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.